“The good, the bad and the ugly” An opportunity for readers to discuss what they like and don’t like about a particular company in the domain space.
Each post will deal with just one company, readers are encouraged to share their positive and negative experiences. Suggestions for improvement are also encouraged.
One of the goals of the column is that company representatives will see how their customers think of them. This can lead to a conversation on fixing problems.
What is not allowed:
- Personal attacks on individuals at the chosen company
- Promoting a competitor
- Posting domains for sale
The company in the spotlight today is Name.com.
Headquarters: Denver
Date founded: 2003
Good: Simple, secure and powerful user interface.
Bad: .com registration pricing and promotions. Mostly always over $9.99
Ugly; They try too hard to sell their New GTLDS. Good for them, not for me.
Good:
secure
Bad:
They stoled 15 consonant 3 letter acronym in .co from my account a year ago worth at the time $290 each.
I was on the phone with them and they told me i could still renew my expired names on the 30th day of the expiration day which that info was inaccurate.
Later they directed my to the contract and it was 25 day that they could take your names away.
On the 25 day they took them away from my account and did not even give me the option to pay a redemption fee to get them back.I went back and forth with e’mails… they did not want to give them back to me.
Ever since i’m transferring my names away from them.
Ugly:
You have to wait 5 days for the name to transfer unless you contact them so they will transfer the names manually .
Name.com needs to give a better way to get past there 3 day transfer hold.
Better bulk options.
Need to beef up support.
I can get cheaper rightside domains from non rightside affiliated companies, why?
Ron, Ben posted in the wrong post just talking about GoDaddy when this post is not about GoDaddy, when I removed his comment and placed it in the GoDaddy TGTBTU, I edited out your part about GoDaddy, if you would like to reply to Ben there, please go ahead. Thank you
http://www.thedomains.com/2016/11/27/good-bad-ugly-godaddy/#comment-217846
good – great interface, 2 factor auth, great occasional deals (happy hour, etc), sedo & afternic MLS participation
bad – lack of advanced search features
ugly – pricing
Good for me.
bad:
lack of useful bulk operations, like changing the DNS for several domains
support takes typically 24-48 hours to respond, no online chat
You can bulk change the dns of multiple domains from your control panel..
The good…
Helpful customer service
The bad…
Useless customer service
The ugly…
Two separate queries dealing with identical requests concerning different domains resulting in diametrically opposed results, one incredibly helpful, the other not, resulting in my having to approach their opposition to deal with the issue at hand.
End result, I felt the need to transfer domains out for my own peace of mind.
I wish their email product offered a catch-all option.
Nice interface for backirder / dropcatch domains which technically are at other registrars
They are certainly a lower price registrar for what are deemed as .TV premiums than Enom
They are not as good at catching. Com drops as. Tv drops
Support is terrible now. You can expect to wait 3-5 days to get a ticket response. Want to call them? You won’t be able to connect to an agent.
There are technical issues that are not getting fixed. Afternic market approval emails won’t get sent even though they claim it’s fixed. Bulk updates are iffy. Seems devs are on amateur hour or don’t’ care.
When Owen Borseth was there he could fix any issue in one day. They should have made lots of efforts to keep him.
The search UI is too cluttered with pushing new gTLDs that they own. Bulk search is slow and garbage.
They raised prices on .COM, .NET and .ORG. Bulk discounts are not good. Also increased domain privacy $3.99 to $4.99, $1. (You can get free privacy by entering – privacyplease – coupon). Did this to help fund BS new domain marketing.
Been transferring domains away. The main reason I don’t use/trust Name/Rightside/Enom is they stole a domain from me.
TL;DR – Bought a new domain from the Name expired auctions, informed someone there, they stole the domain from me and asked me to help promote the company and appear in a video.
I bought – News.social – via Name’s expired auction section. I paid $40 for for the domain name, and it hit my account. I was excited since I wanted a News.tld domain to build a local new aggregation website.
I checked the previous registrant, it was the Name marketing team. I’m a nice person, so I email the community evangelist there. I was wondering if it was an oversight by them. “You’re a good person. Better than most.” is part of the reply.
About a 1 week later I’m informed by a manager at Name/Righside that they took the domain out of my account. A clause in the registrar/registry agreement states with new gTLDs they can do this.
The community evangelist then calls me, leaves a message and says I can have News.social back, if I do a marketing video with Name/Rightside about the colossal F$@$-up.
Since they seem to want to work something out, I call back the community evangelist. I try several times during different times over 2 days. He NEVER picks-up the phone. He then calls at a really odd time and says, “I don’t pick-up numbers from Baltimore.”
WTF? I’ve had some BS told to me by web hosts/domain registrars but this takes the cake. Don’t pick-up numbers from Baltimore? Maybe he’s seen “The Wire” too many times?
Why can’t you be a man and just say, “Yeah we are not giving you this domain back and I don’t want to talk to you.
I decide I don’t need to be a donkey/horse with a dangling a carrot (News.social) in front of me
I have nothing against donkeys/horses at least they are honorable creature (unlike the people working at Name/Rightside.)
I had a positive review of Name, which I removed from one of my websites. The review had good SERP rankings and traffic.
I’ve transferred most of my domains out of Name and will NEVER do business with Rightside. Meaning no buying any new domain extensions. Will only build on .COM/.ORG and ccTLDs in the future.
Many of these new gTLDs will fail. Christa Taylor, DotTBA, says 53%+ of new domains are losing money. She does financial models for new gTLD registries so she knows.
If all these companies love new gTLDs so much why not switch your main site to one? Oh right, because they know they would lose business and SEO juice.
If Rightside and other gTLD companies treat good customers like this… how do they expect usage to grow? Do they think I’m not going to tell people about this?
That is a horrible story. I can confirm their phone-customer service isn’t answering the phones (tried 4 times over the past two weeks, waited up to 40 minutes)
New gtlds are a waste.
Transfer your domains away,
i really trust the name.com for domain name registration. i think they provide most optimal price.
Curent deal with coupon, yes with coupon.. as high as $9.99 for a .com. That’s should not be called a promo…
I pay less than $9 regular pricing elsewhere..
They’ve raised rates on porfolio holders so most are transferring out.
I heard the weed in Colorado is so powerful, you can’t pick up the phone for days, turns your office into stone. Sounds like they need to hire a few non-smokers to restore some vitality to their response times.
Looking at nearly a dozen pictures of their office on Twitter, I saw only one desk telephone, and I think the person sitting next to it was wearing a Beats headphones, listening to music.
I’ve never done business with name.com, but my impression based on the comments is their ship is taking water and they are unable to react, in paralysis.
Better late than never:
Good: UI
Bad: Customer service getting worse
Ugly: Pricing getting worse
Is hard to get a hold of their Help/Support.
Now i am getting phone calls in the middle of the night in regards to domain names i register at name.com
WTF?.
I was not aware they could try to sell my personal information.
I am in contact with my Attorney and have move all my Domains to Namecheap.com
this is really BAD!.