Namecheap users rage at domain transfer pain, but their supplier Enom blames... er, GDPR? Domain registrar Namecheap has admitted that some of its customers have been unable transfer and register web domains – yet passed the buck to its supplier Enom. The issues have affected certain .co.uk, .uk or .de domains – and exasperated users reported having to pay Nominet, the overseer of dot-uk domains, fees in order to …
When I looked into registrars a couple of years ago, everyone seemed to say they were the best. They were one of the first to implement 2FA which was one of the reasons I moved to them from GoDaddy.
I haven't any issues, but would be interesting to see what Google's Service is like.
It looks like it's related to GDPR in this way: "We changed our systems to try to comply with GDPR, but our changed code had lots of bugs in it and it broke lots of things, including transfers in of .uk domains. We can't roll back to the old system because we're so incompetent we left it to the last possible day to roll out our GDPR-compliant software, despite knowing for 2 years that GDPR was coming, so it would be illegal to rollback and now we have to try to fix the issues introduced by these changes. We've spent a month fixing the long list of other issues caused by this change, but still haven't fixed the .uk transfer-in problem."
(Above is my interpretation of the "GDPR Implementation" section of https://enomstatus.com/ )
Based on the number of bugs, I suspect their GDPR project was scheduled by incompetent manager(s) and was going well past the GDPR deadline, so they pushed it live on the GDPR deadline despite them not being finished or ready.
This post has been deleted by its author
This is not all the registrars fault/issue (I have yet to find the perfect registrar).
I have been moving lots of .co.uk domains around for over 2 decades. I have learned to never move a domain until you have confirmed you have control of it.
BEFORE TRANSFERRING: Get your arse to Nominet, login (currently here: https://registrants.nominet.org.uk/app/ ) and check you can manage the domain. Then if issues occur during the transfer you can more easily correct them.
Namecheap annoy the feck out of me by insisting on sending out their domain renewal reminder emails using US style short dates (or "arse over tit dates", as I call them)
Say you have a domain which expires on 6th March 2019. You'll get an email from Namecheap a few weeks before saying "Your domain expires on 3/6/2019" —which you naturally read as "3rd June". I've actually missed the deadline for renewing a domain in the past, because of this.
I've contacted Namecheap about this on numerous occasions, both by email and through Twatter, over the past few years and they point-blank refuse to do anything about it. One reply on Twatter said "We are a US company so we use US date format".
I concluded therefore that either Namecheap are quite happy to see their customers from outside the US go (as I will be doing with each of my domains that comes up for renewal) —or their web engineers are so incompetent that they are actually not able to change their email template so that it uses an unambiguous date format
I have done business with many name registrars and web hosts. Right now, my feeling is that Namecheap is the best of all I have used. Any problems I have had with their services have been addressed promptly by their customer support reps. My domains are currently spread across three hosts/registrars, but I am consolidating with Namecheap.
I agree. Namecheap are the best reg I have found over the last 15 or so years, so I am sticking with them. I am not a huge fan of the new website though.
They keep you updated without pestering you and their systems are simple and relatively easy to use. I don't see how this is their fault - they have been caught out by someone else's stupidity.
No, not in the sense that Europe dictates all this of course. That's nonsense.
But there is a huge problem, and the same happened with the cookie law: not everyone fully understands what they are supposed to do and many will therefor take the safest route out. Sometimes even if this turns into totally ridiculous situations where everyone could see that the whole thing isn't related.
Example? Right now you're pretty much greeted with a warning about cookies for each and every website you visit. Even if all they do is use those cookies to run a forum. Guess what? The cookie law provides in that and you do not have to warn your users about those. It's only about the inter-site tracking cookies which can actually follow users in such a way where another site can obtain useful information from them. So: real data sharing.
But if your website sets a cookie "ls=xx" which, for example, means "login session: x, succeeded. x, needs to sustain" then no one would be the wiser so you wouldn't have to ask for permission.
However, and fully understandable, most don't take chances and therefor ask for the use for cookies either way. It's also easy because most fora and CMS software supports this out of the box.
I foresee the same thing with GDPR. Companies who are misinformed and who will end up doing completely weird stuff because they'll refuse to handle some personal data and blame (either correctly or not) the GDPR. You can already see some of this happening where US websites now block people from Europe so that they don't have to deal with any of this. No EU visitors, no risk of GDRP violations.
People who had already changed their IPS tag to ENOM have had their domains stuck in limbo for around 3 months with Namecheap not able to accept the transfer, ENOM themselves not able to see the domain and previous registrars not able to reverse the process. This meant applying to Nominet for the IPS tag to be changed to something else which attracted a fee of £12 (inc. VAT).
If you're still stuck in limbo you can live chat with Nominet and explain the issue as they have allowed me to change IPS tags gratis due to the issue with ENOM / Namecheap.
Although this isn't Namecheap's fault and is an issue with ENOM's bodged effort to comply with GDPR, their support and handling of the situation has been worse than awful. I went as far as calling ENOM directly and while they couldn't fix the issue, they at the least explained what the issue was and most importantly WHY Namecheap nor themselves could accept transfers of domains.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
