Dotster.com domain name service screws up our website

Published: 7/8/2003

Many years ago we had registered our domain name waztech.com thru Dotster.com, a new (at the time) registrar service that started up after the ICAAN association made domain name registration a public commodity and took the exclusive contract away from Network Solutions.

It was a nice, easy way to register domain names, and we used them exclusively for many years.

However we have recently had many problems with our domain management, the latest problem which caused our domain name to expire and took our website offline for a day.

Dotster had a service called Auto-Renew, which was supposed to renew our domain name automatically without our intervention. Well - it didn't renew it, and the domain name expired, which in itself isn't that big of a deal. The very same day it expired, we realized it, (we couldn't access our site), and we renewed the domain name manually, so the site should have come back up, right?

No. Dotster had to go and change the name server information for the domain to their own name servers ns1.nameresolver.com. So whenever anyone typed our domain name waztech.com in a browser, it would go to the Dotster.com website, and display a message stating that the domain name had expired.

We had to wait 24 hours later for this message to go away, but that didn't stop the screw up. Dotster also had another "helpful" feature called URL forwarding, which proceeded to prevent anyone from getting to our website, by displaying an error message
"Oops. There may be an issue with the Free URL Forwarding service for this domain, in which case our technical staff is currently working the situation. Otherwise, this domain is currently under construction and will be back online soon."

Well, we didn't order any Free URL Forwarding service, and we didn't appreciate Dotster.com taking over our domain and screwing everything up so badly. It made us look bad.

Dotster.com does not have a publicly listed telephone number on their website, you have to go through this ridiculous FAQ system powered by RightNow Technologies, which practically guarantees that you will give up on your problem before you attempt to get someone to help you. They made it really evident that they did not want a customer bothering them with a request for help. But they will gladly take your money anyway they can. Just don't ask for help after the fact.

So we're done with Dotster.com. We're moving to a smaller, more personal domain name registrar, whom we can contact by telephone if we have a problem, and they can fix it right away.

We hope you've learned something from this article. That lesson is "Stay Away from DOTSTER.com"

For more news, view our news listings