During this past week I’ve had an experience with a domain name that can only be described as a nightmare. I found myself with a domain stuck in a “no mans land” between two registrars, the registry and a bunch of crazy policies. So what happened?

The domain name in question was simcast.com and one that I have personally owned for nearly two decades. We’ve been building some really awesome tech at ParkLogic and decided to use this domain as the flagship lander for a lot of traffic. Since it was in my personal name, I decided to transfer it from my personal registrar account at Epik to the ParkLogic Enom account.

I should say that the ParkLogic Enom account only existed due to legacy reasons and I was just trying to tidy things up. During the testing process we discovered that the domain was no longer resolving for a growing number of nameservers…..one of which was Google’s public DNS. This wasn't a really good situation because if the domain went live we could be losing a lot of a traffic....plus one for testing!

I must admit that I’d never seen behaviour like what we were seeing before and assumed initially that it was due to some weird DNS propagation delays. I waited 24 hours and assumed the Internet would sort itself out. Things didn’t improve, in fact, they only got worse.

I contacted the Enom support desk and listened to really bad 80’s music for about 30 minutes while on hold. Seriously Enom, you really need to get some better music! The support person told me that despite what I could prove that everything was fine…..essentially they were clueless.

I’ve had a long-standing reseller account with Enom for many, many years and being a bit lazy I really haven’t checked the pricing for a while. I had the need to register a .com recently and as is my habit I found what I was after and went through to my shopping cart. Boy was I in for a surprise!

I couldn’t believe it but Enom was trying to charge $13.50 for .com domain? Considering that I also use Epik for my personal domains I’m more familiar with paying $8.49. The difference doesn’t sound very much until you multiply it over a lot of domains…..suddenly that five star vacation is getting further away with every registration.

For those of you that are wondering why I didn’t just register the domain at Epik in the first place then you’d be asking a great question. Call it stupidity on my part and I mistake I don’t plan on making into the future.

When did all these pricing changes at Enom happen? I actually have no specific date but wouldn't be surprised if it related to being purchased by Tucows. There’s one thing for sure, the remainder of my domains at Enom will shortly be finding another home.

I’ve just spent the last couple of hours reading reports and listening to updates on publicly listed company, Rightside, post their sale of Enom. Trawling through all the data has been confusing to say the least with numbers from different sources not seeming to correlate with each other. After all of this what are my conclusions?

With the sale of Enom, Rightside is putting more of its eggs in the new gTLD basket. Is this a brilliant move or more of a train wreck in slow motion? Obviously, a lot will depend upon the growth in the ngTLD market.

nTLDstats.com is suggesting Rightside grew their number of registered ngTLDs by 29,537 last quarter which means they are growing at about 13%. From a revenue perspective, they managed to increase by 23% in Q1 2017 compared to Q1 2016. All these are good healthy numbers.

There are a number of basics to business. The first is that you remember to collect the money and the second is to never forget the customer. It just so happens that for quite some time registrar, Enom, has forgotten both of these.

You'll have to excuse the little rant.......About 2 weeks ago I went to top up my account for my domain renewals. It’s a regular thing that I do and I wasn’t expecting any surprises. After clicking the “submit” button I was presented with the server error page below.

I’ve been around technology for a long time so although the error was annoying I wasn’t that phased by it. A couple of weeks later I decided to try adding money to my account again and I received exactly the same error. You would think that after a couple of weeks (at least) that any problems with the payment system would have been resolved.

Sighing to myself I dialled the help desk number and after pressing a series of buttons to select technical support I waited on the international call for around 15 minutes until I finally gave up. I then recalled the number and selected the options for sales support……20+ minutes later I was finally speaking to a support desk person.

They were actually quite helpful and indicated that my credit card had expired and that I needed to add the date to the profile part of the Enom system. I was a little confused by this as I said that each time I added my credit card for the payment I put in the correct expirey date and received the error page.

The person said they have known about the problem for a long time and that for some reason the expiry date for the credit card is pulled from the profile and not from the form you just filled in for payment……go figure?

I politely suggested that someone should really fix an error that crashes the website and the support person became…how shall I say…..less than helpful. Maybe he was just a little frustrated with the tech-teams lack of bug fixing....who knows? I suggested that I blog about my experience and point out to other Enom customers how to get around the problem and the support person thought that was a great idea.

What I would like to know is how long this problem has been going on for and why the heck the support people haven’t communicated to the development team about it? It’s clear that the support people have a work around….so the question has to be asked, why hasn’t Enom’s CTO fixed a problem that strikes at the heart of revenue collection?

Since Enom is holding the valuable assets of a lot of domainers…..what would happen if some of these domains began to drop because people couldn’t get onto the support team for the magic work around? My guess is there would be a lot of law suits flying around.

So Enom, my advice is to stop procrastinating and fix the problem rather than waiting around for a disaster to happen. It improves revenue, customer experience and stops potential legal issues.

In the meantime, if you are an Enom customer the work around is to update the date in your profile for your credit card before adding it again into the payments page.

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.