e-ignite: Tech

Ever since starting my website using a .co.uk domain name, I’ve been trying to get my hands on the associated .com and recently I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had not been renewed by its previous owner. I had to wait for it to become available to register (a period of about 76 days after expiry which seemed to take ages!) and then tried to buy it. Unfortunately, this is where I ran into some problems.

Using whois querying tools, I sat online, watched and waited for the domain to drop before I tried to buy it and my initial problem came when I tried to purchase the domain as soon as it had been dropped from Netfirms, my registrar of choice. Unfortunately, I had been checking to see if the domain was available using their domain query service which had obviously cached the domain details so it didn’t “think” it had been released. No problem, I thought – I’ll just get it from 1&1 instead.  That, as it happened, was a bad idea.

I bought the domain from within my existing control panel (I already have a couple of domains with 1&1) and it showed its status as “the domain has been requested” – I didn’t think much of it and thought that the job was done. After a while, I realised that I hadn’t heard anything from 1&1 confirming the purchase, so I went back to check my control panel and it still showed “the domain has been requested” status. A quick whois check showed that the domain was still available to anyone to purchase from any other registrar!

On the basis I had been waiting a period of years to secure this domain, this news wasn’t well received, especially since I thought the purchase had been made. I checked with GoDaddy and the domain showed as being available – not wanting to risk losing it, I purchased it from them immediately. GoDaddy were able to secure the domain for me within seconds, it came off the open market and was mine. My 1&1 control panel still showed “the domain has been requested”. 1and1.co.uk are supposed to be a reputable domain registrar, yet I was able to buy a domain 50 minutes after I had “purchased” it from them – to me, that is unacceptable.

After a period of around two hours, my 1&1 control panel showed “the domain has already been registered” and I received precisely nothing from 1&1. No email was ever sent to me to say that the registration was unsuccessful, no warnings or anything were given which is utterly pathetic. I didn’t really want to take this lying down so I emailed complaints@1and1.co.uk and explained why I wasn’t happy. I had a few laughable responses from them including my personal favourite:

Me: “This domain was purchased via another registrar a significant amount of time after I had placed my order with 1&1.  This is not acceptable.”

1&1 Complaints Dept: “I’m sorry someone had registered it before you.  This is unfortunate, but it does happen.  There are people who make a living off of these low tactics.”

After a further three emails to the Complaints department, I managed to extract an interesting bit of information from 1&1 that they don’t tell you:

Me: “Can you please explain why 1&1 are unable to register domains at the time an order is placed? Why does 1&1 require 12-24 hours to register the domain when other registrars do so immediately?”

1&1 Complaints Dept: “1and1 registers domains in batches.  After a certain amount of registration requests are submitted, 1and1 then proceeds to register them.  This is why we ask our customers to allow 12 – 24 hours for official registration and word of such. We apologize, however, this is the way our system works.”

So in summary, 1&1 do not register your domain straight away – they put it off until they have a load of registrations pending, then they do it in a batch. In the domain industry, five minutes (or even seconds in some cases) can make a massive difference and it seems utterly unbelievable to me that 1and1.co.uk operate in this manner. If you are buying a domain, you want it to be secured immediately and therefore I recommend that you avoid 1&1 and that you use better registrars such as Netfirms and GoDaddy – I’ve had excellent experience with both of these registrars.

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