I want a better domain transfer mechanism
Recently I have bought and sold a few websites and the experience of domain transfers was quite horrible.
First I acquired a site that was originally hosted by MelbourneIT, which is sold as yahoo hosting (i.e. Yahoo outsources the service to MelbourneIT). I did some research before starting the transfer, and learned that nether MelbourneIT nor Yahoo are helpful with the transfer and what one needs to do is just wait for the FOA (”Initial Authorization for Registrar Transfer”) request to expire and ICANN forcefully take over the domain and transferring it to the new registrar. In other words you need to get the authorization code for the domain name, and initiate the transfer and just wait for about a week.
Then I sold a website, whose domain was hosted with 1and1.com and the same story, the buyer initiated the transfer and nothing was happening (i.e. he was getting “awaiting approval” on his site). I cold 1and1 support and they told me that I don’t need to do anything, just wait a few days. After 3 days nothing was happening, so I called 1and1’s support again and the guy on the other side (sounded India), said I just approved the request. I asked him, why did I have to call to get the approval, but he couldn’t give me a reasonable answer. Their FAQ is horribly outdated and wrong and when I told support about that they told me, yes we know… so much for FAQ.
Frankly I don’t understand why in our era it should take a bunch of emails and phone calls and weeks to get the domain transfered. Granted I understand that the previous registrar doesn’t want to lose their business, but they are going to loose it anyway, holding onto a domain for another week won’t make any difference.
I think ICANN needs to set better regulations where a domain transfer is done with automatic mechanism, involving no support emails and calls.
The best experience so far I had with godaddy and namecheap where a domain was transfered within the registrar (domain push) - the whole process took a few minutes and no support mortals were involved
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I just bought some web sites off Digital Point and experienced exactly the same problems. It has been a few days and my GoDaddy account still shows “Pending Current Registrar Approval”. I have only got this to say, cheap doesnt mean good. I know 1and1 provides very low costs domain name fees, but they way they handle their domain name transfers, well, if you are doing domain name trading or are trying to sell your websites with domain names, or would be transferring your domain names over different registrars, this is one server you MUST avoid.
Total frustrations for me and the seller.