2 years ago I took out hosting for a non-profit project with a cheap hosting provider, the domain name registered via. them and is distinctive .org address. I notice that on the registrant information for the domain name, my hosting provider is actually listed as the admin, not myself, which is a little odd.
The hosting provider has had many support and service troubles in the last 2 years, and there are news articles (e.g. the register) about this. In one case last year, they lost a server and didn't have backups: that was not too much of a problem (an annoyance though ...) for me because I push a copy of mysite from a local development machine, however apparently other people (e.g. sites with forums) were not so lucky - they had no backups. In general, I suspect the hosting providers are a couple of cowboys would thought they could make a load of dough in the dot.com boom by owning a couple of rackmounts in an exchange, not realising the real amount of work and effort that needs to go into such an operation. They doubled their prices about 12 months ago as well.
Soon, my account is about to expire. I want to transfer my .org and account elsewhere (actually to pairNic, who are fantastic as I use them for something else and they are very professional and savvy), but I cannot complete the transfer for my .org as an "Auth Info Code" is required to do so. I tried to contact my host, they have ignored emails for the last 2 weeks. They have also ignored support tickets. In fact, the support tickets have been closed by someone other than myself without any answer provided. Last week I gave them 5 days notice to provide me with at least a reply to my questions and they failed, so yesterday I lodged complaints with Internic (as suggested by .org PIR) and with relevant local authorities (Trading Standards UK). Today I find the hosting main webpage is unreachable, although my virtual host is still reachable and serviceable.
My .org will expire in about 28 days. The risk is that I will not be able to transfer it. If I cannot transfer it, the option seems to be to `wing it' and try and re-register elsewhere on the date it expires: and perhaps I can waitlist it as pairNic offers that ability. The risk is that someone else has it waitlisted and will gazump me. If this occurs it seems that I would probably have a good case under dispute resolution anyway, and could probably even seek civil redress against my hosting provider who fail to even answer any questions about the ability to transfer the .org away from them.
Has anyone else experienced this sort of problem? Do I have any other options available to me?
I've had no success trying this over the last two weeks: email not reply to, support tickets closed and erased, etc -- the latter suggests that the hosting provider is actively ignoring me.
I read in other community forums that others have had the same problem with this hosting provider. It seems as though I am stuck, as you say. I was hoping there may be some option, or someone else with similar experience could tell me how it worked out for them.
I find it absolutely attrocious that the hosting provider acts like this.
