Read this before you register a domain name with Yahoo. Yahoo Small Business sells domain names at a very attractive price, but Yahoo is not an accredited domain registrar. It is a reseller for the Australian registrar Melbourne IT. If you ever have a problem with your domain registration, you have to deal with Yahoo, and its support is appalling to an extent I have never met before. They consistently and repeatedly replied to my emails with irrelevant pre-made messages. This did not happen once or twice, but about fifteen times.
Because of my first experience with their support staff, I rushed to transfer my domain to another registrar as soon as the 60-day no-transfer period after registration was over. The transfer was systematically denied. Whenever a human replied, the answer showed a striking ignorance of .com transfer procedures, and cited transfer requirements that apply only to other types of domains (.info and others).
After three days I called, and was told they could not do anything and was referred to Melbourne IT. After emailing and calling Australia several times, I was told I had to deal with the reseller, Yahoo, directly. I do not know at this point whether my transfer will finally go through, but I have already spent much more on international calls than the price of even the most expensive domain registrar (Network Solutions, for example, sells domains at USD 35).
If you want a cheap domain registrar with capable support staff, I recommend the following, having tested them for years. GoDaddy will do the job if you only want basic registration with no options such as private registration, but beware: they are master marketers and will try every trick to sell you additional products. Gandi is a bit more expensive, mostly owing to the low rate of the USD, but its service includes at no extra cost features that some other registrars sell as private registration, such as hiding your email address in the WHOIS database to avoid spam, and also virtually unlimited email and web redirections.
Other customers described similar problems.
One wrote: I registered a domain name with Yahoo in 2005, under a secondary, rarely used Yahoo ID. I do not remember the password, the secret question answer or the date of birth for that ID, because most of the information I typed when I created it was not real. I have the credit card information I used to register the domain. I want to get access back to the domain or transfer it to another registrar. I have called Yahoo repeatedly, and they say that if I do not remember the secret question answer or date of birth, they cannot help me. Is there a legal organization that oversees practices like these by Yahoo and Melbourne IT? If this happened in a grocery or other shop ("you have to keep it and you have to keep paying me"), the law would get involved.
Another wrote: Same song and dance from Yahoo. I transferred four domains from other registrars without any hitch. Then my two Yahoo domains: their customer service people were downright condescending, and they told me to just wait a few days and try again. Why is it so hard for them to provide an authorization code when everyone else plays fair?
Another: I had the exact same experience. I will never do any type of web business through Yahoo. All of their services are awful. I have also made several complaints to officials about Melbourne IT, which should not be a certified registrar.
Another: I registered a domain name and decided to cancel it within 24 hours. After I got confirmation of the cancellation, my credit card was charged the domain fee anyway, and the domain is still registered under my name and not available to the public. I have no access to the domain until it expires. When I emailed Yahoo's domain support, my email never got through; I received a mail delivery message saying that the domains-support address has permanent fatal errors.
Another: I am also having problems with a domain transfer from Yahoo/Melbourne IT. I want to keep my Yahoo hosting account but use a different registrar. Yahoo apparently never considered that some people would want to keep their hosting services but change registrar.
Another: I strongly dislike Yahoo Small Business. I am a web designer, and my client registered his domain with Yahoo before he brought me on board. We have been trying to transfer it for several weeks. You cannot reach these people easily, they do not know what they are doing, and they are starting to irritate me.
Another: I had a nightmare with Yahoo. Transferring a .org domain is even more difficult because registrars require an "auth info" code. Yahoo's customer service people were willing to take us halfway (cancel our Yahoo account so that the domain and email no longer functioned), but then backtracked and left us stranded. Yahoo claimed Melbourne IT should give us the auth code; Melbourne IT claimed it only releases the code to Yahoo, and that Yahoo was aware of this. After 10 emails, 20 calls and 30 days, I called Yahoo with one of many case numbers and refused to hang up until they provided the authorization code. Finally the Yahoo representative gave me a "registry key" matching my .org domain at Melbourne IT. With that I could log in and retrieve the authorization info code needed to transfer the domain to my new registrar. After 30 days of complete incompetence and misinformation from Yahoo, I submitted a complaint to ICANN and posted these messages. Yahoo's marketing scheme is to (1) offer an easy, inexpensive process to sign up for a domain, (2) charge high yearly fees with low service and functionality, and (3) use unfair business practices to prevent customers from moving to a better service. If anyone starts a class action against Yahoo, sign me up.
Another: I am in the process of transferring my Yahoo .com domain to GoDaddy. GoDaddy's customer service is good, though not excellent, and I am at the stage of waiting for Yahoo to reply to GoDaddy to finish the transfer. However, worse than Yahoo is 1and1 web hosting: their customer service reps are terrible and treat customers badly, and I would never recommend them to anyone for any service. I just got off the phone with them trying to get a refund for my automatic domain renewal. They charged me on the first of this month even though I registered on the 13th of last year. They did not give me a refund, citing their terms and conditions, and they do not even send an email reminder. I make websites for a living and used to recommend their hosting to my clients, but never again.
Another: While the .org domain was registered through Yahoo over a month ago, any lookup (Internic whois or other sources) says it is not registered. If you query Melbourne IT, they say it is. After a month I would expect the data to be synced, but the whole world cannot see the website because only Melbourne IT knows it has been registered. An interesting side effect is that other registrars continue to show the domain as available for purchase.
Another: It seems ridiculous to offer low introductory prices and relatively high renewal prices. Any customer looking for cheap domains will end up upset. I too have discovered Yahoo's abysmal procedures and support. My Small Business .org website has been down for 6 days already with a 404 error, and finding the correct information for transferring a .org domain away from Yahoo is a nightmare. What I did: first, change the Yahoo name servers to point to the new host's name servers (recommended, not required). Second, cancel your Yahoo account in the Yahoo control panel; you must do this before you can get your registry key or authorization code. Then call Yahoo about 4 hours later and tell them to release the domain name to Melbourne IT. Yahoo then emails you the domain registry key. You can log in to Melbourne IT with the domain name and registry key, but there is no menu choice to obtain an authorization key automatically or to start a transfer, so you still have to email Melbourne IT ([email protected]) or open a support case. Yahoo Small Business and Melbourne IT are the worst I have encountered.
Another: If you booked a domain at $2.99, beware. Their terms and conditions state that the domain is non-transferable, which I am sure is an illegal condition. All domain names are also automatically renewed, at a higher price, on or before 30th June, even if booked on 29th June. If you booked more than one domain at this rate, you are in default, since the terms say you are only eligible for one domain at this price. The quoted terms say the offer is open to new Yahoo Small Business customers only, is limited to one per customer on a single account, is non-transferable, and that Yahoo expressly reserves the right to change the price or features of the services at its sole discretion at any time.
Another: I am also experiencing the joys of my domain registered with Yahoo. I am trying to transfer it to DreamHost, who have been wonderful in trying to help me, and I find that Yahoo is not so great when it comes to this. Another user wrote that because of Yahoo's third-class services, he is trying to change registrar so he can hire another hosting company.
Another: Yahoo Domains and Melbourne IT still will not tell me the auth code for my .org domain. They do not reply at all. I have contacted a lawyer in California and am putting together a small case. I do not want money, I just want the code. Another user also could not get the authorization code for a .org domain: Yahoo does not reply to emails, and even though the domain is unlocked, the transfer cannot proceed without the code.
Another: GoDaddy needs the email address of the registrant, not the registrar or technical contact, to start the transfer. One user unlocked the domain and tried to initiate a transfer to GoDaddy using the tech address from the WHOIS record, but nothing happened. In reply, another user explained that Yahoo domains and Yahoo web hosting are separate: if you only want to change hosting you do not need to change registrar, and conversely. The procedure to change registrar depends on the domain extension, but for a .com you should only have to unlock the domain in the Yahoo domains console and initiate the transfer with the new registrar. Someone else suggested calling Melbourne IT directly, since Yahoo in California will easily blame Melbourne IT in Australia; the ICANN-accredited registrar is Melbourne IT, not Yahoo, which is just a reseller.
Another: We need to publicize Yahoo's appalling behavior to warn people against registering domains with them. What worked for one person: cancel your account with Yahoo, then ask them to release your domain to Melbourne IT. It is stupid, since they already control your domain. Set up an account with Melbourne IT first, then request your auth code. Be prepared to do this more than once. One person reported that after re-initiating the transfer a few days later, it finally went through.
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