Register.com Still Playing Transfer Games 10 Years Later

10 years after ICANN first implemented its inter-registrar domain transfer policy, Register.com is still leading the way in customer-hostile game playing that serves no real purpose other than to stem the bleed of customers away from their high prices and poor service. Here’s a recent email that I received from them when I tried to transfer a domain name away from them…

You recently requested an auth code to transfer your “somesillytestdomainname.com” domain name.
Your request has been processed and at this time it has been declined due to recent suspicious activity in your account.

Register.com is committed to providing the most secure and reliable domain services for our customers.
We have implemented specific security measures to help prevent unauthorized transfer of domains to another registrar.
The type of suspicious activity that could have caused your request to be declined includes:
- Multiple failed attempts to login to customer’s account
- Recent changes to the account holder’s name, email address, or login ID
- Attempts to access the account over the phone without authorization
- Recent changes to the accounts password
- Domain name lock not removed
- Recent changes to billing or credit card information

To receive your auth code, please call one of our customer service consultants at 1.888.734.4783. They will confirm you to the account and then fulfill your request.

Thing is, most auth code requests receive this type of a response. From what I understand, it is basically impossible to retrieve an auth code from them via the web.

This is one of the reasons we work so hard at Hover to understand what other registrars are up to and invest so much in systems and processes that help customers move their domains. Most of them are playing games, making it virtually impossible for regular people to move their business to a new registrar without jumping through a myriad of self-serving hoops. If you ever want to move your domains to Hover from a hostile provider like Register.com, feel free to give us a call and let us take care of the details. It certainly beats having to get a PH.D (Doctorate in Domains) just to move your business to a new provider.

(and yeah, I’ve heard the whole “we are worried about our customers security” argument a thousand times before. Domain hijacking is no more prevalent at registrars that don’t play transfers games than their are at ones that do.)

My customers, not your eyeballs

SaaS is a great model and I especially like how it can solve small business problems very quickly. Using a web service instead of developing custom code in-house can really decrease the amount of time it takes to develop a new idea and launch it into the market.

One of my requirements for web services is that my brand takes prominence over theirs. Some services are better at this than others, and I’m fairly forgiving on this point – sometimes the URLs aren’t as clean as I would like or our ability to brand the service is limited, but generally SaaS providers understand the importance of helping us put our brand in front of our customers.

Most SaaS providers offer this enhanced branding as an upsell from their free offer. No cash mean no branding – this makes total sense to me. This arrangement is essentially an advertising relationship where I let the SaaS provider advertise their brand to my customers in exchange for free use of their service. In some cases, I’m also really cool with this arrangement but for the most part, I prefer to just pay up and take advantage of the branding for my benefit.

I ran across one provider this week that seems to want the best of both worlds. They want me to pay for their service (no free option) and their solution is heavily branded with links and logos to entice my customers to use their service. Thinking that I must have missed something, I sent an email to their customer support team asking how I can turn off their branding.

Their response was that they had no plans to offer this feature in the near future. I wasn’t really surprised at the response, but I was definitely taken aback by the temerity of their strategy. Do they really think this is a sustainable way to grow their business?

In essence, their business model presumes that I will pay them money so that they can advertise to my customers.

Screw that. My relationship with my customers is important and precious – there’s no way that I’m going to distract them with someone else’s corporate messaging in this way.

We’ll be moving to a new solution soon.

Bullet Time, Wet

If you are familiar with the technology behind the original “bullet time” effect in the Matrix, you will really appreciate how trick this commercial’s production is – getting all of those cameras on the water is no small feat. Watch this one in full screen.

- Rip Curl Mirage Campaign from Time-Slice® Films on Vimeo.

Check out Core 7 for more details.