I mentioned netweaver in my previous post; I’m going to have a bit of a bitch about them. That’s what blogs are for, right?
I originally registered robotsbuildrobots.net with them a few years ago, mainly because it was cheap. Turns out you get what you pay for though, because they weren’t the most stable of domain hosts. I think they had at least 1 massive server failure with some period of down time every year I’d been with them. I also hosted community forums with them at the last company I worked for but was asked to take our business elsewhere because they couldn’t support the amount of traffic we were getting (but that’s another story altogether). Before xmas, I decided to move robotsbuildrobots to my new host where all my other domains live.
For the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying to transfer the domain away from them, and it kept failing. I checked out all the domain details, contact email address on their user control panel and it looked fine, so I mailed netweaver support about it to see if they could see what the problem was, but they kept passing the buck saying it was the new hosts that were causing the transfer failure (I’d transferred a few domains in with the new hosts with no problem). I asked them to double check wether the registration info they had for the domain was correct, and they just didn’t reply to me, even after chasing it a few times over a week and a bit. Which is a lot like being ignored.
While waiting for them to reply, I did what I should have done before I started this whole process, and queried the WHOIS info for the domain; it turned out the administrative email was an old address I don’t have access to anymore. I tried to change the admin contact address in the netweaver control panel, but it didn’t change the record at Netweaver’s registrars, Tucows.
So, I emailed stupid Netweaver to point out the discrepancy between their records and the actual domain record, and again, I had to chase them about 8 times over a period of about a week. This time they actually replied, and they told me again it was my new hosts causing the domain transfer to fail. I replied to them, repeating the problem and asking them to fix it, and once again, no response. I’m now going nuts and pulling my hair out over this, and I remembered that there are people who govern domain names to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
My next mail to netweaver said I’d take my complaint to ICANN if they didn’t respond by the end of the day - again, no reply… So then I went to the ICANN website, and discovered they don’t really handle complaints with domain resellers, have to go to the registrar first. So, I went to tucows/openSRS and made a complaint through them, and within 10 minutes Netweaver mailed me back and fixed the problem. Yet they *still* tried to blame me for not checking it myself(I did!), and tried to tell me that the fact that they were not updating the public domain record to something I explicitly wanted it changed to is a kind of security feature that they offer:
The details we hold for you are independent of those published to the publicly accessible whois database for your own privacy. This information is available to anyone who wishes to view it - you were able to check it at any time, as were your new host on your behalf if you were not able.
To which I replied with ‘tossers’. I’m not one for petty insults, I think it’s always better to be professional, but these guys really earned it.
Doesn’t matter now though, domain’s up and running on the new host and it’s all good. Moral of the story is: make sure your domain records are correct.