It’s my turn to add to the hundreds of horror stories people have posted about RegisterFly, possibly the world’s worst domain registrar.

Years ago, when I didn’t know any better, I registered a few dozen domains with RegisterFly that have remained mostly unused. Over the years they’ve provided shitty support, have overcharged my credit card, have had unexplainable DNS & webmail outages, and have been combative when dealing with support & billing issues. However, out of extreme laziness, I never transferred the domains I’d registered with them to another registrar… until now.

A simple change…

This all started when I decided a few weeks ago to park my RegisterFly domains with parked.com — I figured that if the domains were getting any traffic, I should be the one to get the Adsense revenue. Pointing my domains to parked.com required updating their nameserver settings. Simple task, right? RegisterFly even provides a bulk tool for updating nameservers.

…that wasn’t so simple

Getting the nameserver updates done, however, proved not so easy. In fact, it was impossible. Try as I might, changing the settings in bulk or one domain at a time, nothing happened. I contacted support four times about the issue. Each time, they’d get back to me after a day or so to say that the nameservers had been updated, and to “kindly check again” in 24 to 48 hours… but nothing ever happened.

Uh-oh…

I began to Google other customer experiences with RegisterFly and found no shortage of horror stories about overcharging, bad customer support, and, worst of all, stealing domains from their own customers.

I became worried that maybe there was a reason my nameservers weren’t being updated… Looking at some of the domains that were more likely to receive type-in traffic, I saw that RegisterFly had them pointed at some rather slick parking pages. Worse still, whois records showed RegisterFly as the owners of the domains, despite the fact that their ‘ProtectFly’ whois privacy protection tool was supposedly disabled on all my domains.

This freaked me out, and I decided to transfer the domains to Namecheap ASAP, despite the fact that none of them would expire for at least six months. To my great surprise, within a few days, I was able to fix my whois entries and get the necessary EPP codes to perform the transfers, the last of which completed a few days ago.

Despite my problems with RegisterFly over the years, I consider myself one of the lucky ones — at least I still own all of my domains, and I never have to deal with that godforsaken company again. I suspect, but can’t prove, that RegisterFly had blocked my nameserver updates because they were making a bit of change off of the parking pages they had my domains pointing to. Multiply my experiences by hundreds of thousands of customers, and you have some serious domain parking revenue for RegisterFly.

Enom Terminates Their Relationship with RegisterFly

Midway through my domain transfer process, I got an email from Enom stating that, based on customer complaints, they would be terminating their reseller relationship with RegisterFly (RegisterFly has been a reseller for Enom, meaning that Enom is the actual registrar of record for RegisterFly domains). Had I received this email sooner, I could have had Enom take over the domains without paying the renewal fee, but it’s okay — I’m just glad to be done with RegisterFly. Unfortunately, it looks like RegisterFly is now an ICANN-accredited registrar in their own right.

What You Can Do

Don’t do business with them! There are plenty of other cheap registrars (I currently use Namecheap). If you have domains registered at RegisterFly, you can transfer them to Enom. And finally, if you have your own RegisterFly horror story, share it at registerflies.com.