About a week ago I finally moved the cringely.com domain to EasyDNS from Network Solutions, my registrar since 1992. I have written in the past about how much I hate Network Solutions, but this was our final connection and I am now free. But not without them kicking me on my way out the door, crashing this blog for four hours this afternoon.
I began the domain transfer last Monday but Network Solutions, in its infinite wisdom, decided to complete the transfer today, Sunday, at 2:04 PM Pacific time. That’s when they simply shut down my DNS despite the fact that I’m still paying for their service (I’m paid up until November). According to EasyDNS, of all the domain registrars only Network Solutions and GoDaddy drop customers cold like that.
“We value your business,” they said in a final message at 2:04 PM.
Yeah, right.
EasyDNS has tech support for six hours on Sundays but I didn’t know the service was down. The service I use to monitor uptime on this blog sends e-mails when there are problems. But wait, because of the DNS mixup my mail was down, too, so no warnings could get through. Readers couldn’t e-mail me, either, to tell me the site was down.
Finally a reader called me, six minutes after EasyDNS phone support closed for the day.
As a last ditch attempt to get this rag back in print I fired off an e-mail to EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic, who called me a few minutes later. Four more calls and my DNS problem was solved for both blog and e-mail, which is through Google Apps.
I don’t know who is the CEO of Network Solutions, but I’ll guarantee you he or she knows even less than I do about DNS. Nor would I get a call from them at home on a Sunday afternoon.
Thanks, EasyDNS.
What I know now but many of you probably knew already is that there is a logical sequence for switching over a domain: 1) copy your server DNS settings; 2) set up the name servers at the new registrar with those settings, and; 3) ONLY THEN start the domain transfer.
I had stupidly switched the domain first then waited like a doofus for something to work or break. It broke.
But it wouldn’t have been a problem if Network Solutions had left the DNS settings up for awhile like every other registrar does except GoDaddy. And it wouldn’t have been four hours of downtime if they hadn’t dropped the records on a Sunday afternoon, which I see as simply mean-spirited.
Some people will say I’m taking this Network Solutions thing too personally. Maybe I am, but I’m glad to be finally free.
firstamundo
You are not taking it too personally. Those of us who have escaped them have our individual stories – and they are horrible. For those who may not know, Network Solutions was the first and – for years – the only domain name registrar. When other services were authorized/licensed/permitted it was partially to put competition into the game. And, man, did NS clamp down on us with weird rules and mind boggling procedures. Cut you off on Sunday afternoon. Almost predictable.
Hooray, Bob! I’m glad your site is back up and that Network Solutions is in your rear-view mirror.
Wow! we have something in common. I too stupidly stayed with Network Solutions for years and years even after I knew that they were charging me about 3x the competition. You at least appear to have changed everything. I am still with an ISP who charges similarly to NS, but maybe I will get off my butt???
I changed to GoDaddy, only as a registrar. Hope that does not turn out to be a mistake. You don’t sound too positive about them.
Scott
Hope you have a secondary contact email (solely for this purpose, with a free unrelated provider) now set up on google.com/a and easydns.
But man, I feel for you.
I registered my first domain at Network Solutions in 1995 when it was $40/year, then moved to GoDaddy for $7/yr. GoDaddy is technically more competent but the extra layer of sleaze and the barrage of up-sell pages was more than I could stand.
I have gradually moved everything to ZoneEdit / Register.com, which is lean and cheap — the way I like it.
WARNING: GoDaddy did something particularly nasty the last time I tried to transfer. Any modification to the administrative contact info triggers a six-week lockout for transfers. This forced me to buy another year to bridge the lock-out period.
I follow this site via a RSS feed on my iGoogle page, and the last 2 stories did not show up. So maybe not 100% fixed or do I need to update something on my side?
Bob,
Your site is still down when I checked using AT&T on my iPhone as of today, June 25, 2012 at 2:50pm.
I have one client that still has NS and I still get junk mail to remind me how much I hate NS. They made my life miserable before I finally jumped ship to any other dns.
I’m looking for another dns service besides GoDaddy since I am not so thrilled with some of the exploits of the owner, let alone their business practices.
I’m confused. If your site was down Sunday from 2-6 pm, how come I was able to see it and place this post:
Ronc says:
June 24, 2012 at 2:13 pm?
Just in case there is a time zone problem it’s now 3:27 pm on the 25th in CA.
Sorry, I meant 3:37 pm today so your site displays the time one hour earlier than it actually is because your site has not “sprung ahead” for DST. So that means I actually placed yesterday’s post at 2:13 pm PST or 3:13 pm PDT; either way, it was still up at that time, and a little later since I think I checked back to review my comments for that column.
Ron: The mysteries of DNS are deep and one of them is “TTL” — time to live. Your DNS server may well have cached cringley.com (either correctly or incorrectly — depends upon who you use for DNS) longer than it was supposed to and as such, things were A-OK.
Yes, caching would explain old content still showing up but I did not think it would also allow me to post new information to a site that was “down”. Coming to think of it, if Bob is using PST instead of PDT the difference between 2:13 when I posted and 2:04 when Bob thought the site went down based on an email, is only 9 minutes. Could be I just made it before it went down.
I agree that Network Solutions is awful, just awful. Plain awful. Bad awful.
We moved to to GoDaddy, which is much cheaper, but is equally awful but for different reasons. As a registrar, Yahoo is awful, too.
Just an fyi.
Be seeing you.
And to your checklist, under monitoring, make sure the alerts are going to a different domain (don’t worry, we’ve all made that mistake once), and prefably also have outage notifications sent as SMS to your phone.
But Network Solutions are truly awful, the worst and most deliberately frustrating registrar I’ve ever used, they did everything they could to make transfering away from them painful and difficult. GoDaddy aren’t great either (endless upsell, initial SOPA support, etc). Most of the others I’ve tried (DomainMonger, DreamHost, etc) seem fine.
You hate them, you hate them a lot, yet you keep your domain registered with them for 20 years? Something doesn’t match there.
I’m a simple person with simple needs. Register. com has been fine for me, but I probably don’t challenge the system any.
I try to avoid Network Solutions like the plague and I refuse to switch to a cheap registrar who advertises their services by implying that using them will help you get laid by pretty girls.
I pay a little more than I would with GoDaddy for the 150 or so domains I manage because I use an OPENSRS affiliate. I have the affiliate’s phone number on speed dial and the president answers his own phone, even on weekends. He even runs secondary DNS for me so that if the lights go out here in Florida, I’ve got a DNS server responding in California.
I used to build ISP’s back in the 90’s. Quickly learned that you keep your domain registrar separate from the hosting service. I can move the site at any time without any fuss. Just a simple mouse click.
And if you have a good registrar and a good host then of course it’s even better.
I’ve been using DirectNIC for I don’t know how long and they are great. No weird (what feels like criminal) stuff like GoDaddy. For hosting I’ve been using DreamHost for a long time as well.
DreamHost do have a million sites so you can get in trouble if your load goes up, but then it’s just a matter of ensuring you have the right service with them. They are also the only ones who blog about their problems. I like the openness as it’s a big indication of where the management is at.
I agree too that one should never use the same company for hosting and DNS.
I also use a virtual credit card number so neither can charge my credit card repeatedly.
I understand GoDaddy can sell your DNS without your approval if you use their “anonymous” service.. as they are listed as the owner… Is this true??? I’d stay away from them for a multitude of other reasons anyways.
I have also heard bad reports of Mail dot com forcing upgrades once you become a regular user of their system…. ouch. Scams everywhere….
Most cell phone numbers work as an email address, for small messages. For example, my provider is Verizon, so if you send an email to ##########@vtext.com (insert my cell number) then I get a vibration in my pants pocket. Hooray for me.
You should figure out the email address for your own cell phone, and use that as a contact for your downtime-monitoring service. You may want to configure a little different so that you’ll get fewer messages.
I’ve noticed that when I send a text or multimedia message to a phone number, I don’t need to know the “domain” part of the phone number. I once sent the same message to my normal email address simultaneously with the “text” message to another phone using another carrier, which allowed me to see all the recipients in the email header I received. My phone automatically inserted the same domain for the phone number I was sending to as that used by my carrier and it worked. Since the number completely defines the destination, my theory is that all email messages to any cell phone number can use any cell carrier’s domain. Anyone care to comment on that unproven theory?
Ronc, what you are doing is not email, but SMS or MMS, which is exactly as you describe for cell phone to cell phone communication. It generally doesn’t work to a standard land phone line.
I have yet to see an email client that didn’t barf at phone number as an address, though I can imagine some smart phone email clients might redirect such addresses to SMS or MMS as appropriate.
I’m talking about an email client on my computer. It treats the sms/mms (phone # @carrier.net) message and an email. The email program or service doesn’t know what a cell phone is, it just takes the address and uses it. The trick is for the carrier that receives it route it to the correct cell phone based on some sort of mutually kept list explaining which cell carrier currently “owns” the 10-digit number. That’s how all phone calls and all cell mms/sms are routed, why not messages created in an email? As Howard says, email already works if you put in the correct carrier domain. My point is it should work even if you use the incorrect domain just like cell-to-cell mms/sms.
Ah, now I see what you are talking about Ronc. From your first post it sounded like you where trying to put in just the phone number as the full email address, rather than just putting in a random cell phone provider’s domain after the @. The only email client you mentioned was a phone.
I think one big reason why this doesn’t work universally can be best summed up as “Roaming charges”. I would bet that your provider is well connected with the provider of the number you were sending too. Remember that email infrastructure does have a cost, and why should I pay for some other providers’ users to email some other providers’ users? Where it would make sense would be only from mail sent from a phone with an account that is part of that phone’s service, that the delivery out bound might be (perceived?)cheaper switching it to SMS/MMS rather than go the SMTP route and some of the spam implications there (as if they don’t exist on SMS/MMS)
What you say makes sense from a “who pays” standpoint. In the case I described, the message originated on my phone using my carrier’s domain as the destination even though the destination was Cricket (cdma-based) and my carrier is AT&T (gsm-based). Next, I’ll have to try to originate the same message from my computer to see if it still gets there using the AT&T domain as it did from my phone using the AT&T domain.
Ran into another complication using PC email to cell: Sometimes you can get an SPF error if the sending email domain is not registered which happened with my custom domain. I got the message through to Cricket using the proper email for Cricket and sending from a Hotmail address instead of my domain. Not sure if it would still work from Hotmail sending to a Cricket phone number using an AT&T domain as the destination. More testing needed.
I can’t say enough good about EasyDNS. When something (very rarely) breaks, I can always get a live person who is very knowledgable and helpful.
Allow me to sound off as well.
My wife and I have issues with GoDaddy. So, when I registered a new domain, I went with Network Solutions. I paid extra to ensure my personal information would NOT be displayed to WHOIS lookups. I absolutely despise telemarketing and spamming. No point making it easy for such types.
Less than a week later, a telemarketer calls my cell, wanting to know if I want to put a website on my shiny, new domain. I do web dev for a living, so I wasn’t interested. How about SEO? I do that, too. How about subcontracting that work out to them?
It took about 15 minutes to convince them that I was NOT going to toss some work their direction. Where did they get my information?
They work for Network Solutions.
In a year, when that registration expires, I will NOT be renewing there. I’m sure as hell not transferring my other domains there.
It’s in our motto, We’re not happy until you’re not happy!
Wow, Network Solutions… Been a while. They were my first…[sigh] and then they pretty much stopped answering the phone. Had a nasty process to prove you were you if the registration lapsed – almost to lawyer’s letters. Dropped them cold by ’98.
Then: Tucows… Dotster… always customer service issues (mostly lack of), and really, how much do they have to serve with no hosting?
Being Canadian, I ultimately found a good one located in Ottawa: decent prices, they faithfully answer the phone, always helpful. I send all my clients there. Privacy cheerfully provided and the data is here in good ‘ol Canuckistan, away from the Patriot Act.
I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with the Patriot Act…
(maintaining non-spam by NOT plugging/linking them – how Canadian!)
I have not had the pleasure of bending over for Network Solutions, but I HATE GoDaddy. I have a domain there, I have tried 4 or 5 times to get it moved over to the registrar where the remainder of my domains are handled, but they shut it down EVERY FREAKING TIME. Sigh.
I’ve been using easyDNS for over 10 years without a complaint for my clients and myself. When ever there was an issue, they were right on top of it. They blog their problems as well as successes, if something is happening that affects their service, you’ll know about it. It is at http://blog2.easydns.org/ and this issue is part of the stream. They are an amazingly transparent and ethical organization and are highly recommended.
I was very happy seeing that Bob had switched over, and not at all surprised to see that Mark had responded like he did. While I haven’t spoken directly with Mark, I knew he was involved in at least one of the issues I had with a client, and was very happy with how it all went.
[…] are created equal, so do some research. There are plenty of examples of Network Solutions doing dumb things to customers. Go Dadddy's CEO has been known to hunt and kill elephants in […]
Well, I am one of those that left GoDaddy in the SOPA-wave. Fortunately I was a bit late, so they had given up harassing customers at that time, and the new registrar (NameCheap) already had a FAQ up on how to remove your domain form the clutches of GoDaddy specifically. Others were not so lucky, and apparently had to threaten them. Also, fortunately, I run my own DNS Servers, which was the only reason to go to GoDaddy some years ago. They at least understood what I wanted and supported it. I have have a 16 Email-exchange with Yahoo! small business somewhere, where they refused to acknowledge that it is even possible to run your own DNS-servers, so at least more stupid than Go Daddy is definitely possible.
If you want to have SMS reminders that you can use in your own script or application, email me at devanhcrow@aceenterprises.com
Thankfulness to my father who told me on the topic of this
webpage, this webpage is in fact awesome.
Wow, amazing blog format! How long have you been blogging for? you make blogging look easy. The full look of your site is fantastic, let alone the content material!
Amen
I’ve had a gut full them also! Stopped using them a month ago and still they email me trying to get my money
and telling me they can’t access my credit card. If they finally crack the code to my credit card I’ll crack em court. Bloody idiots!
Well Well here we go. Fell for the .50 domain under a microscope I checked out making sure that I did not purchase any of the domain privacy and other crud. Next day found out they had charge my account for the works. After several hours I got my domain working with blogger. Today I let them know I would be transfering to Godaddy who I have a bunch of domains with and have had great experience. Purchased a transfer and counting down the days. After that network solution call my site went down. Bottom line you get what you pay for. A .50 cent night mare.
About the Cable: You can find bulk supplies of Ethernet cable at many computer stores or most electrical or home centers. You want UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) Ethernet cable of at least Category 5 (Cat 5). Cat 5 is required for basic 10/100 functionality, you will want Cat 5e for gigabit (1000BaseT) operation and Cat 6 or higher gives you a measure of future proofing. You can also use STP (Shielded Twisted Pair) http://tzfa.org/index.php/our-blog/network-solutions/34-ethernet-cables-and-connectors-tricks
Netsol is not the worst, but they’ve fallen a long way since the days when they were the only .com registrar on the planet. I would rate their DNS control panel the worst on earth, if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of other registrars don’t event HAVE DNS control panels, and lots more have ’em but no TXT or SRV records.
But it is infuriating that at Netsol you cannot even see if you made the changes you intended to make. You have to make changes, then wait 10 minutes or so, then go look at them to see if they “took”. And I’m not talking about propagation here; I’m talking about if the ‘took” at Netsol.
Ive been fighting with NS now for over 2 months for an account I don’t have! So, when my bank account went negative I found the charge and called. Got the run around from them telling me I had to give them my domain name or CC information. After telling them I didn’t have an account I was told (firmly) I had to have one. When I asked for a supervisor I was hung up on. I called back and got the same person but this time I got a supervisor. Was told I would have an email sent to me and I had to fill out the information and send it back. 9 days later I had to call back again because I STILL have not received the email. Again I had to call and argue with them to send the paperwork. Now, you have to fax the paperwork back and of corse I had to pay to send it back. So, after 2 months Im still getting charged and STILL fighting to get my money back.
Take everyones advise on here!!! STAY AWAY FROM NETWORK SOLUTION!!!