If you want to ensure your domain is transferred smoothly and correctly you can read the exchanges below that demonstrate that a website / hosting company with poor internal controls could try to continue to invoice you even after a full transfer and learn from it.
The only real lesson to learn is don’t deal with amateur website design / domain resellers and if you have already done that and want to transfer to us ensure you email them confirm all hosting / email / registrar requirements with them are now terminated
[Old Website Design Company to their old Client]
Just contacting you as I have spoken to the company we deal with for website hostingi in regards to an invoice which has been passed to you. As you will recall, we recently transferred your web hosting to your new provider and quashed the invoice relating to the hosting fees for the previous year owing to the confusion in the transfer of the website to our new servers.
The new invoice is however for something completely separate from the hosting and is for the domain names which we are still paying for on your behalf.
Apologies for the confusion initially on what needed paying for. Obviously these are the costs incurred by the Marketing company up to November of last year for your domains which we are simply passing over to you to cover our costs.
Going forward, I am quite happy to set you up with an account of your own and transfer control of these domains to you personally should you want to take this over yourself or we are happy to continue administering these domains on your behalf should you wish.
I would be grateful if you could liaise with the company we use for domain hosting over the payment of the due invoice and also let me know how you wish to go forward with the domains.
[Client to Old Website Design Company]
I thought this was all settled, now I get this. What’s happening?
[Old Website Design Company to Client]
I have to say that I originally thought that we were talking about a previous invoice concerning the issues from a few months back. However, what transpires is that whilst your guys have taken over your websites the domain names were originally registered by us so when any website comes up for renewal we renew them so that the domain name is not lost. We have had cases a number of years ago where some clients websites came up for renewal and we contacted enough times making them aware that they were due and to pay for them for which they did not respond. We therefore did not renew them and the domains were lost. In light of what was then the ensuing shit storm where clients blamed us for them losing their domain names ( it was obviously our fault and not theirs that they never responded to our requests!!!) we put in place a policy to automatically renew all website domains that come due as a matter of course.
So when your recently came up we automatically renewed them along with everyone else in that month and that is where the recent invoice has come from. The invoice is charged at a flat rate and our hosting company are not making anything out of it. They are also happy to transfer them over to your guys but they do not want to be out of pocket for protecting the client. I think this is fair.
[Client to New Website Designers]
Further to our discussion this morning regarding the change-over of websites, I have now received this. Your thoughts please
[New Website Designer to Client]
This is confusing and I can see why you don’t know whats going on. It appears that your old website designer is dealing with a third party company that has a reseller hosting account and they simply are invoicing you automatically. Your registration and Hosting is now 100% with us and nothing to do with them. You cant renew a website when you don’t have the registration or hosting or any technical responsibility for it. I assume this ‘renewal’ was on their internal systems but since the transfer took place they should have removed you from their internal systems.
Just for interest, we have only had 2 clients transfer from us and we remove them immediately from our internal and hosting systems
[Client to Old Website Design Company]
I have run this by the Essex website design company transferred to and asked their advice. In the light of his professional opinion, see above, coupled with the fact that no one at your company communicated your internal policy to me at any stage up until now, I do not see how I can be liable for this bill.
Because of friendship, I deliberately did not press for compensation arising out of the debarcle that saw the lost of my email system with the loss of important emails, both personal and professional, and the foul-up with the Server change-over that saw warning notices appear on website searches by people trying to access my website.
This problems persisted in various forms from last autumn until March of this year when I moved to Delicious Webdesign. A move I instigated directly because of the poor service I had suffered. I hope this will not affect our friendship, but I cannot accept a bill as a result.
[Old Website Design Company to Client]
I am sure our friendship will survive this. I am meeting with the company that looks after our domains and hosting tomorrow and will discuss the issue with her and get it sorted.
In the meantime I think your guys need contact mine so that we can move the domains over to them and you are fully serviced by them. I have to say that whilst it’s easy for them throw rocks at us and look like the good guys I am somewhat astounded that they did not raise this issue of who hosts your domains with you when the “took control” of your activities. I could go into War and Peace about their interpretation of things and their glaring misconceptions of what actually happened and resulting issues, but at the end of the day we have been at fault and we have accepted complete responsibility. However, I think we need to draw a line under it and all move on so that you, the customer, is best served and I will ensure that happens as soon as possible,
[Marketting Company to Old Website Design Company]
I am startled at the lack of knowledge being shown by his new provider!!
A simple domain search will show that the admin contact shows our email address and the technical contact is the hosting company which is the people we register domains with!!
All we did to “transfer” his site was to repoint his nameservers, similar to redirecting your post to another address, this is so basic it’s untrue and the fact that they don’t know this is astonishing. Let me know what he responds and I’ll get it transferred. I would say he is not in very safe hands with his new provider however but hey ho.
[Old Website Design Company to Client]
Below is an internal email from Rob Parker to me concerning the issues with your new provider. As highlighted in my email to you – I know we were at fault and we have more than held our hands up. That is the only way I do business and I think in any issues you have ever had with my company over the past 10 years that has proven to be true. I also think that if you think back over that time we have often gone way beyond what most companies would have done for you and often not charged for numerous site visits when we could have. I can recall a time when you lost everything and we saved your bacon and charged you something like £80 when normally we would have charged something in the region of £400-£500 for that to a normal customer.
So, as stated yet again, my company will do whatever it can to ensure that you – the customer – is happy and can move on.
However, that said, looking back on the new company you have chosen – as pointed out in Rob’s comments below – we have been quite stunned at their lack of industry knowledge and their observations and interpretations of what has gone on and how we are to blame. The majority of their observation and what they have told you is quite alarming. It was my decision when they started throwing “rocks” at us for us to keep quiet and say nothing and pass everything over to the new provider you chose, otherwise it would only deteriorate into a war of words and you would be piggy-in-the-middle not knowing what was actually right and what was wrong. I know we could have cause a storm over the extremely poor knowledge and understanding your new guys have and if this had been any other client I can assure you I would have insisted that we go to extreme lengths to show their ineptitude. It’s like a motorbike mechanic telling you that the Porsche garage have cocked up the service on your 911 and starts telling what they have done wrong and what wires and tubes to take out and connect somewhere else. And then you returning to the Porsche garage and tell them they got it all wrong according to your motorbike mechanic.
So now it’s time for them to stop throwing rocks and get on with managing their clients to the best of their ability! Then there will be no excuses and no one else to blame.
So as already requested, can you get your new guys to contact Rob and he will ensure that everything is concluded and you can be completely in their hands.
I have also taken the decision and informed our Marketing company that your outstanding invoice will be paid by me personally and that you should not be charged.
[Client to Old Website Design Company]
Thank you for your email. In fairness to the new Essex Website Designers they did not, as you say, ‘throw rocks’ , but rather replied to the email I sent him seeking his advice.
I will them today and have him speak to your technical guyr, as you suggest, in order to finally resolve this.
[Client to Website Designers]
Please read the email above. Could I ask you to contact them and talk this through please?
[New Website Design Company to Old Website Design Company]
Thanks for raising your concerns here and I will do my best to explain what I think you are assuming and what has happened during the transfer process, sorry if you thought I was mud-slinging but I was simply relating the historical actions that we undertook on our client’s behalf during the transfer. You have also identified a small ‘bug’ that takes place during transfer to some registrars, where the admin details are not updated during transfer, and an happy to say that has now been resolved and addressed.
Here are the facts as I see them:
1, The three domains detailed below were transferred about the 10th March 2012 – they were transferred when you supplied us with two EPP codes and took our IPS tag (for the .co.uk domain) and we transferred them normally to our Registrar (ENOM) your registrar as you know is 123-REG.
2, The contact details were filled in correctly during registration (using the client’s details)
3, Name Servers were instantly changed from your nameservers to our nameservers from there all hosting and email function responsibility defaulted to us. (This was done on the 10th March)
4, We have investigated why the .co.uk domains don’t show the new admin details on the whois information and have found that the registrar and Nominet have a problem with their APIs where they don’t communicate correctly. This is being addressed apparently but its purely an admin exercise as the registrar is clearly shown as ENOM on all 3 domains.
5, If you check the admin details on via a whois lookup for the .com and .net domains you will clearly see no reference to your host.
6, We never were given your nameservers for hosting or email so could never have officially used them for code or email and can confirm that from the moment of transfer the domains were hosted independently of your company. We have transferred in approximately 200 domains in the last 2 years and have experience of a variety of advanced requirements, but this transfer as far as we are concerned really is a ‘vanilla’ transfer and believe it proceeded normally.
7, The statement made and repeasted below is not the way we understand the transfer process in this instance and I refer back to the information in point 1 that shows that no nameservers were set on your behalf as no nameservers were asked for and the transfer took place by asking us for the IPS Tag and giving EPP codes (in other words the transfer was done completely to us for registrar and hosting)
Reference your comment – ‘All we did to transfer his site was to repoint his nameservers.’
Sorry for any confusion we created by stating our case but the key to the matter is not looking at the admin details via a whois lookup and assuming that we only repointed the nameservers, but to look at the facts and by looking at the Registrar in the whois report that since the 10th March has been set to ‘ENOM’ which is our registrar.
[Old Website Design Company to New Website Company]
I think there may well be some issue with our registrar therefore as all of the domains all still showing under our account with them, with auto-renewals and we have been paying renewal charges recently on all of them which shouldn’t now be the case if they are under the control of your registrar. You will see this from the following screen:
There is most certainly however one which you have missed during the transfer and that seems to definitely still point to us, both as registrar and on nameservers. I have therefore unlocked this and requested a release code which we will provide to you as soon possible. Hopefully then you will be in control of everything that is required and I can request to the registrar / hosting company that they disassociate us from those domains.