Network Solutions Misery

Cedric Puddy cedric at thinkers.org
Sun May 21 17:25:06 UTC 2000


On Sun, 21 May 2000, Henri J. Schlereth wrote:

> > our domains are utk.edu, utsi.edu and utmen.edu which we want to change
> > to tennessee.edu and utn.edu.  we have found network solutions to be
> > totally unhelpful.  on the average it has taken them FIVE WEEKS! to 
> > respond to e-mail and then it usually is a form that does not answer
> > our requests.  we cannot go somewhere else as they are the only ones
> > who register edu domains.
> > 
> So what about getting together with other universities and setting up an
> edu registrar?

I went and read the rules, application forms, and related 
guidelines that consitute the process of setting up a registrar.
It's medium-complicated, requires a bit of back-end work
in order to program a system for doing registrations, and
requires various capital sums - USD$20,000 s/w licence fee,
a large performance bond (~USD$150,000, or something like
that), and so on.  It's a bit heavy on the legalese. (!)

Before you tie up that much capital, one needs a better
reason than "it took a little hassle to do a domain name change",
esp. when there are _so_many_ other registrars which one
could deal with (one of 'em has be good, and ~USD$50 is
less than ~USD$200,000 + staff! :)

As fort the NSI, I used have problems with them a few years
back, but haven't had any issues recently (~1yr).  As a
hosting and consulting service, we deal with a measurable
number of domain registration issues every month.  As for
_moving_ of names, I've never bothered to try it - it always
seemed a heck of a lot more straight forward to simply
register the new name, migrate off the old ones, then
delete the old ones.  New registrations are usually
processed very quickly, and who cares how long it
takes for them to process a delete (in this situation,
anyway)?  (I understand the need for the change process
if you want to change the official OWNER of the
domain w/o loosing the domain or risking someone
else registering it between you deleteing and
reregistering... but that doesn't sound like 
the problem explained above).

I've gotten very random service from some of the other
registrars, and I know exactly how to make the NSI 
hop to it when need be.  As I a result, I'm still
using the NSI, though I have started to look at the
TuCows services as an alternative as NSI does not
seem interested in talking to me about setting up
a charge account (been trying that for months!:),
so that I can service my domain customers properly,
as opposed to making them do their own registrations.

	Regards,

	-Cedric

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