Plusnet Domain Transfer woes

After years with Freenetname and Madasafish on dialup and through to ADSL, the news that Madasafish was closing prompted me to move up to FTCC with Plusnet.

Used the online chat rather than wait over 40 minutes to speak to someone, and arranged for my org.uk domain (which I've had since I joined freenetname) over to Plusnet, as well as to kick off an order for fibre.

Kicked this off on the evening of 30th November, and by early afternoon on 1st December noticed I was not getting any emails to my domain. Wow! that was quick I think. Did a quick whois lookup on my domain and I got this result (edited to remove personal data):

Domain name:
xxxxxx.org.uk

Registrant:
xxxxxxx

Registrant type:
UK Individual

Registrant's address:
The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their
address omitted from the WHOIS service.

Data validation:
Nominet was able to match the registrant's name and address against a 3rd party data source on 01-Dec-2015

Registrar:
No registrar listed.

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 09-Oct-1999
Expiry date: 09-Oct-2017
Last updated: 01-Dec-2015

Registration status:
Registered until expiry date.

Name servers:
No name servers listed.

And there it has stayed ever since. No registrar, no name servers so no email.

I've contacts Plusnet several times via chat and have updated the ticket but am being told it takes a minimum of 72 hours for someone to look at this. Strange, as they broke it within 18 hours! I'm told there is no way of escalating the issue - ridiculous.

Does anyone know how I can get this resolved - presume there is nothing I can do directly through Nominet is there?

Thanks

The usual route is to post on the Plusnet Forums and hope that Bob picks it up as he is the guru on that sort of problem

Thanks...

Is that Bob Pullen? I'm sure he helped me on some Madasafish issues a while ago....

yes

In reply to a post by gb7:

After years with Freenetname and Madasafish on dialup and through to ADSL ...

Me too. I moved to PlusNet in August 2014, although I'm not (yet) on FTTC.

I'm intrigued that you are in the process of transferring your domain to PN, because I was advised that in order to retain my domain name (and associated web space) I should downgrade my Madasafish account to JustMail, at a cost of £1.69 per month.

How are PN charging you to host your domain? Does your web space also get transferred? According to this page it'll cost you £52.88 every two years to renew an org.uk domain. This compares with £40.56 for 24 months of JustMail

Ye Gods!

Click the Tsohost link in my sig!

DotUK domains cost well under £7 per two years from all dedicated hosting companies, with email hosting on the domain starting at £15pa or lower.

Transfer the stuff into there.

In reply to a post by kbturner:

How are PN charging you to host your domain? Does your web space also get transferred? According to this page it'll cost you £52.88 every two years to renew an org.uk domain

Nominet's wholesale price for .uk domains is £2.50 per year (soon to rise to £3.75) so the mark-up Plusnet are adding there is incredible.

Yes, maintaining a domain name is really cheap - although it should be as they don't exactly have to do anything. It's kind of like having to pay the Post Office to maintain your address to deliver mail.

I have my website and email hosted by a friend who charges me nothing - and has been since about 2000

I like that Nominet was set up as a not-for-profit company. Even with their low wholesale price they still make a surplus, which they donate to charity via the Nominet Trust.

Quite a refreshing approach really.

Didn't know that. It is a good thing indeed, shame that some companies are adding charges on top of that.

I've also had a domain name fall down a black hole. Not with PN bu with 1&! who are one of the big registrars.

I wanted to relinquish a domain so I informed 1&1 and haven't been invoiced for it or paid for it for over 2 years. But it's still shown as registered so it's unavailable to others. It's on my 1&1 control panel but I can't do anything with it, notably switch off the redirect associated with it.

I've complained to 1&1 a couple of times but to no avail. i've decided to just live with it and hope that one day they might notice.

To the OP: Good luck in getting your domain sorted, but as others have said it would be a lot cheaper to get it transferred to another registrar. I did this many years ago (PN to1&1) without any problems.

If you can't get this sorted with plusnet. nominet (the registry for all .uk domains) have tools that will allow you to do this via there online services.
They also have a help desk that you can call (that will be answered by a real person within seconds) that will help and advise you what you need to do.

Take a look at the nominet website, particularly http://www.nominet.uk/domains/manage-your-domain/onl...

If you own any *.uk domains, you should setup a nominet account for security in case of ISP issues.

Thanks all for the advice - seems like I'm not the only one that has had issues.

I'm still without access to the domain, and it seems Plus.net can't / won't do anything as the domain is no longer tagged to them (of their doing!). I have spoken with Nominet this morning and have gone through their 'regain control' process and am just waiting for their response.

I found some registration letters from Nominet last night from 2003 - 2005 which will hopefully be useful proof it does belong to me!

Once I've regained control I'll hopefully get it re-tagged and get some email.

You don't just need the domain, you need email hosting as well. Also web hosting if you have a site.

A domain is just the title. It isn't a service. I assume Plusnet were providing email and web hosting with the domain. If they were, was that "free"? That would account for the apparently very high price. The domain need not even be registered through the same provider as the web/mail hosting, but at our level it's sensible to have them the same.

I pay my domain registrar (Tsohost as posted before) £6.70 every two years for domain hosting, and £14.99 per year for combined web space and email hosting.

Web hosting always includes mail hosting, but some companies will supply just mail hosting. In both cases the domain remains (technically) a separate item. As explained above.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 04-Dec-15 11:24:12)

Thanks - Understand that.

I'm taking this one step at a time! Plus.net will be hosting the domain (eventually...)

Hmmm.

Tsohost answer both phone and email within minutes. 24/7.

and when I phoned them - twice over a Wordpress problem - the line quality was so bad I could hardly understand them

In reply to a post by gb7:

Plus.net will be hosting the domain (eventually...)

Why? Makes no sense to me.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Ye Gods!

Click the Tsohost link in my sig!

DotUK domains cost well under £7 per two years from all dedicated hosting companies, with email hosting on the domain starting at £15pa or lower.

Transfer the stuff into there.

Second the recommendation for Toshost, I've been using a reseller account on their cloud to host a few friends (rather than let my previous cpanel server fall into neglect due to time constraints and risk it getting hacked due to lack of maintenance).

Definitely not the cheapest provider, not by a long shot but they actually do seem to care about providing a decent service. They've always been pretty quick to respond when I've needed them to do something or had a question.

Seen a few short outages, usually either when a San goes wonky or they get DDOS'd but they're usually resolved quickly and they tend to be pretty good at providing RFO's and letting you know what they're planning to do to try and prevent a re-occurrence.

Which is exactly doing it right in my book, you can't plan for every single possibility it's about how they react when something does go wrong that makes one of the key differences between a good provider and a bad one in my opinion.

Right... Time for an update!

Started the 'Regain Control' process with Nominet on Friday morning, and rang them at about 5.20 on Friday to see if they had had a chance to review.

What a helpful place they are - phone answered almost instantly, and spoke to an incredibly helpful chap, who asked me to send in a scanned letter with a scan of proof of ID (Driving Licence). Once I'd done this, rang back (by now it was probably about 5.45 and they close at 6pm) and spoke to him again. He read the letter and authorised the 'regain', so I was able to log into my domain and point it to FORCE9 (PlusNet's tag) for a tenner. He stayed on the line throughout the process - I was seriously impressed with their approach to customer service. If anyone from Nominet is reading this, tell Andrew Hyland he's doing a great job

I then needed PlusNet to update my domain with their nameservers, but they don't do this over the weekend - Monday / Tuesday was the best they could promise...

Reading the posts on here, I decided to move my domain away from them and point it to TSOHost. Cost me another tenner with Nominet online to re-tag, but I'm now all set up with TSOHost.

Having been with email for almost a week, there is no better sound than the little 'ping' noise Outlook uses to notify new mails!

Thanks for all the replies and advice!

Well done.

You won't regret it, and Tsohost are impressive if you ever need help or advice.

Did they by any chance add a free year to your domain registration? They used to do that on normal transfers in, but I haven't been involved in one for ages..

I have needed to use their backup recovery for a few emails in the past, when I screwed something up. Dead easy, with no need to contact them.

In reply to a post by keith969:

Didn't know that. It is a good thing indeed, shame that some companies are adding charges on top of that.

Given that the "wholesale cost" doesn't include the other costs involved, it's entirely reasonable they're "adding" to that.

Much like PlusNet are adding margin to the "wholesale" cost of broadband.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Did they by any chance add a free year to your domain registration? They used to do that on normal transfers in, but I haven't been involved in one for ages..

Isn't that just on .com/net type domains - and if so that's not tsohost, that's how transfers work.

It's on .uk domains.

I hope you are claiming the £20 from Plusnet!

I've managed to get them to refund me the first Nominet fee to get my domain tagged to FORCE9. I'm happy with that - it was my choice to re-tag it to TSOHOST, although I feel I was forced to do something to get my email back!

Did you lose any emails? Or had they stacked up waiting for a valid target?

Lost them all

I did try sending some test emails from another account and they they get returned as undeliverable, as with an un-tagged domain there is nowhere for them to go...

TSOHost are reasonable however my cloud hosting has had 2 hours downtime over the past 7 days, including several outages of around 30 mins.

One of the advantages of cloud hosting was supposed to be that if a server failed there was another ready to take it's place very quickly and automatically so how do you get a 30 min outage?

I quickly gave up reporting the brief outages (been like this around two years) as they didn't seem to take them very seriously. For now I just accept the occasional outages but would have to think carefully about putting anything critical with them. Which is a shame as I was looking for a cloud host to shift some of my reseller account over to.

In reply to a post by RoosterUK:

...so how do you get a 30 min outage?

Anything outside of the cloud infra (servers/storage) such as network to their servers. I believe they've had a fair share of DoS attacks of late. Related maybe?

Matt

In reply to a post by RoosterUK:

One of the advantages of cloud hosting was supposed to be that if a server failed there was another ready to take it's place very quickly and automatically so how do you get a 30 min outage?

Cloud services do not automatically equal resilience. Often you have to buy resilience options. Cloud hosting often means "someone else's server".

However cloud based applications such as email (Gmail / yahoo) are often resilient due to their design, delivered from multiple data centres which replicate the data.

In reply to a post by uno:

In reply to a post by RoosterUK:

...so how do you get a 30 min outage?

Anything outside of the cloud infra (servers/storage) such as network to their servers. I believe they've had a fair share of DoS attacks of late. Related maybe?

Matt

Looks like today is a DDoS attack, they have put it up on the status page. Apparently we could contact support and be moved to another load balancer.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by RoosterUK:

One of the advantages of cloud hosting was supposed to be that if a server failed there was another ready to take it's place very quickly and automatically so how do you get a 30 min outage?

Cloud services do not automatically equal resilience. Often you have to buy resilience options. Cloud hosting often means "someone else's server".

However cloud based applications such as email (Gmail / yahoo) are often resilient due to their design, delivered from multiple data centres which replicate the data.

TSO own their own Tier 3+ data centre with multiple links so the impression given is that their cloud is very much their own servers, which hopefully is the case.

They had servers spread over 3 datacentres but not sure if that is still the case since they built their centre, perhaps everything was moved to a single site.