They also charge to transfer domains away to another reseller, which is something which was always a free service with my old reseller. I can still access the domain control panel at OpenSRS, but this company seems to have locked the .com domains to prevent them being transferred. As for the .me.uk domains, they refuse to perform the tag change to allow me to transfer them to another reseller unless I pay them a fee.

sounds pretty sketchy to me. can you provide the name of your new host so i can check em out?

Are they in breach of the Data Protection Act for handling customer details without those customer's consent?

Probably not, though I think they are obliged to inform you of the change.

There's probably a disclaimer somewhere determining 'how' details can be communicated/transferred as 'normal' operational process.

As for the price hike....about all you can likely do there is complain to the UK equivalent of Oz's ACCC ....consumer affairs advocate....

sounds pretty sketchy to me. can you provide the name of your new host so i can check em out?

I don't want to post a direct link to the company, but suffice to say my old reseller went by the name of Firevision. That should help you in any investigations you want to do...

But surely one company can't simply hand over their entire customer database to another Jafo? I'm sure there has to be some illegality involved...

The possibility also occurred to me that they might simply be the same old reseller going by a different name, perhaps to shake off the 'bad press' produced by those emails sent out by Tucows. However their offices appear to be in completely different parts of the country and both companies have been around for a few years.

Something I didn't manage to do was get a snapshot of the site a couple of weeks ago when it included a list of updates on the progress of the transfers. From what those postings said, it sounded like this company actively persued the owner of Firevision to get him to hand over the customer database. They then arranged a 'mass transfer' with Nominet for all the UK domains - allegedly 600+ of them! I don't understand why Nominet would allow such activity without it arousing some suspicion.

after reading this Link i have a better idea of what's going on.

if nominet is the uk's primary registrar--or at least the registrar that licensed firevision--i guess they feel they're acting in your best interest. in either case, it would seem as if they screwed up by selecting firevision as a marketing partner and you shouldn't be liable for their mistake...or for such an outrageous fee to transfer your domain account to another, hopefully more responsible, host.

if it happened here, i'm guessing someone would already be in court but since yall are less litigious, perhaps theres someone in the government to whom you can appeal for relief?

as far as the personal data transfer goes, i'm guessing that's a necessity if this guy is totally incommunicado.

i hadda client for whom i'd set up a fairly extensive 'store' (at their request) thru a free site provider. a little more than 2 years into the project--just as the site was beginning to pay off for my client--the operators had some sorta serious financial problems and they pulled the plug. fortunately, i'd recently finished updating prices following the publication of their annual print catalog and i'd made a point of downloading the entire thing so it wasn't quite as bad as it mighta been. unfortunately, the site went offline the day after thanksgiving which is the first day of the holiday buying season.

six months later, they'd reorganized and contacted us to see if we wanted to join their new portal. i just said no thanks...but no thanks.

Thanks for the link kingbee, reading that has really shed new light on the situation. It still doesn't mention anything about SiteWizard, the company who have taken over the domains, but at least it's reassured me that I'm not the only one with problems.

I'll keep you posted on any progress...

Personal information...aka customer database is a commercial comodity which 'might' be protected from being on-sold to an external entity....eg advertising, etc ... but a corporate merger/takeover....that's a whole different thing.

I doubt you are 'excluded' from that potential information transfer...

I thought you might like to read the most recent email from SiteWizard. I particularly like the comment tacked on to the end...

Dear Mr Purcell, Thank you for your comments, we take our customer service extremely seriously. Firstly, when you say you would like to have been given a choice of registrars to go to, who would be giving you this choice? FireVision was gone, so I am assuming you would like Nominet and Tucows to contact each person individually and ask their opinions and do the paperwork. Whilst they were carrying out this massive task I assume that all domains that had not been renewed, you would like to just expire and have the owners lose them? We had to act fast, a business decision had to be reached that would stop people losing their domains. If you were one of the people who had saved their domain from expiring by being automatically transferred to us, and been telephoned, emailed and written to avoid that loss, you would be delighted with our service, as many hundreds of customers already are. I know that if your email address had been changed there are VERY few domain registrars in the country that would PHONE you and chase you up until you had given a firm yes or no. I understand that you are angry, since FireVision being down has caused a great deal of resentment, but you also have to accept that whilst we are trying to stop domains being deleted by expiring and stop domain hijacking (which people were doing whilst the domains were unlocked) we are experiencing a great deal of administration. If you imagine 10,000 domain names and say 300 want to be unlocked and released - who is going to do all that admin for free... are you volunteering to come in and work for us for nothing? We are not a huge company. We have a team of twelve people in our Maidstone offices and to cope with the enormous amount of backdated domain renewals we have been forced to ask an admin fee. We ARE NOT asking an unreasonable figure. In fact the admin fee we charge is EXACTLY what you would have to pay Nominet if your domain HAD NOT been transferred to us. EXACTLY the same price... except Nominet would take at least a week or ten days to perform the transfer, but we do it the same day. Again, showing our excellent levels of customer service. I rarely write such replies as this one, but it annoys me that you are threatening to publish derogatory articles about us, when if you took a step back you would understand all our decisions are sound business decisions that have helped the clients that had lost their services through the FireVision debacle. We have had to PAY for the privilege of having you as a customer. Once the main bulk of the admin has been dealt with, we will resume our normal mode of operation and perform the domain administration for free again. We are probably the ONLY web site design company that will design a web site completely, and offer a 30 day money back guarantee. How you can accuse us of having bad customer service I don't know. We track all calls and ensure EVERYBODY gets a returned phone call, we ALWAYS return calls. A company with a solid 30 day money back guarantee on web design CANNOT have bad customer service. It simply wouldn't work. Anyway, we are quite happy to release your domains back to the FIREVISION tag, from whence they came, and you can go back to trying to contact FireVision. From there you can pay Nominet to rescue your domains back from limbo. Just let me know when you would like them released back to the FireVision Tag and I'll ensure it is actioned immediately. Alternatively, you can utilise our services and point the domain wherever you want. Our DNS control panel allows a fantastic level of control of the technical functionality of the domains you own. We are not charging for this service... you can use it for free! Alternatively you can pay our REASONABLE admin fee to transfer the domains wherever you want. Relating to your legal concerns, the database we got from FireVision was merely an out of date database of where to point the domains all of which was in the public domain. All other information was got from Nominet and Tucows, the terms and conditions of which you agreed to by purchasing the domains. We have most certainly not contravened any laws. I look forward to bringing this matter to a mutually agreeable close, Best Regards, Richard Ells Director -----Original Message----- From: SiteWizard Support [mailto:support@sitewizard.co.uk] Sent: 15 July 2005 15:55 To: rich Subject: FW: FireVision domains now working through www.sitewizard.co.uk Hi Rich, This is that guy, read his previous comments there well funny!!! Ive unlocked the .com domain he was winging about Cheers Gary

And my reply...

Mr Ells, Perhaps it would have been prudent to remove your staff member's comment from your reply prior to sending it. Apparently he considers this situation 'funny' and my valid concerns to be 'whinging'. It rather flies in the face of your comments about good customer service does it not? I understand the overhead that your company has incurred as a result of this situation, but I don't think either of us are really naïve enough to believe that your actions were for anything other than profit at the end of the day. You are running a business after all, so you wouldn't have taken on Firevision's customer base without first being sure that the deal would be a lucrative one. The sheer number of domain renewals you will undoubtedly sell as a result of this should guarantee you a tidy profit at the end of the day. Which makes it all the more jarring that you are charging so far over the odds for the service in comparison to just about every other domain reseller I have investigated. I'll have to take your word for it that other domain owners have been thankful of your actions, but I have not felt that same sense of relief. I also fail to see how your apparent expertise at web site design relates in any way to this issue. The most important thing that your company failed to do was manage customer expectations by contacting the owners of the domains before the changes went ahead. Until your email came through telling me you were in control of my domains, I had not been aware of any problems with Firevision. So I'm sure you can appreciate my confusion and scepticism upon receiving that email. It wouldn't be the first time that I've had a company approach me to offer their 'services' in safekeeping my domains. While you may have moved heaven and earth to contact those customers who were about to lose their domains, you made no effort to contact Firevision's long-term customers who were unaware of the situation. My comments thus far have been out of nothing more than frustration. I had previously had three emails ignored by your support team, and when I finally did receive a reply it seemed to be of the 'cut-and-paste' variety rather than addressing my actual questions and concerns. I therefore feel my comments about poor customer service were fair. As for your claim that the transfer fees you wish to charge are reasonable, perhaps you could explain to me how charging £25 for a service which would ordinarily cost at most £15 represents value for money? Even then you are charging this for each and every domain you transfer, whereas Nominet charge at most £30 for a batch of transfer requests. Something that also struck me about your email was that you offered to change the IPS tag for my domains back to FIREVISION if I was unhappy. Would you charge me for this? If not, perhaps it would be easier for all concerned if you simply follow my wishes and change the tags to WEBCONSULTANCY. Then this whole sorry incident would come to a close and you could return to exchanging flippant comments about your customers with your support staff. Regards, Kevin Purcell grayhaze.com

The man uses the words "delighted", "excellent" and "fantastic" to describe his own company. Shady, very shady. The employee comment though, is a typical "look, we have a whining customer" remark. Wouldn't get too upset about that, it's company nature.

Anyhow, moral of the story: spread your risk and don't park all your domains in the same place.

The company email 'appeared' all well and lovely....but unfortunately the in-house comment was pretty damning [one wonders whether its inclusion was accidental or not]...

There remains, however an 'expectation' of privacy/confidentiality with person to person emails, the same as with telephone conversations...and both are 'protected' under the same 'Act'.

It's probably not an 'ideal' situation to publish such emails on a public forum....

yall really use the word 'whilst' frequently?

you argued your point well. i'm not sure how, why or under whose authority sitewizard/nominet/whomever were allowed to divvy up the neglected accounts.

the thing about saving hapless owners from domain registration expiration is nonsense. domain owners have a relatively generous grace period after the official expiration date as i recall.

disgraceful.

There remains, however an 'expectation' of privacy/confidentiality with person to person emails, the same as with telephone conversations...and both are 'protected' under the same 'Act'. It's probably not an 'ideal' situation to publish such emails on a public forum....

That's pretty much why I removed his e-mail address from his reply. I just thought it might be of interest to anyone who's in a similar situation to see an 'official' quote from the man in charge.

Mainly though I just posted it to point out the stupidity of certain high-level execs when it comes to emails.

The employee comment though, is a typical "look, we have a whining customer" remark. Wouldn't get too upset about that, it's company nature.

I wasn't really upset by the comment, as an employee is only as good as his training. I did think it made a useful hook from which to hang my argument though.

The new company does not sound trustworthy or like they would exist in their current

form for long at all, that is right. This post is extremely interesting for a newbie

like me wondering which country to set up my first somewhat independent site in,

whether to have it locked, how much to pay for it, etc..



Germany where I reside and know some companies my friends + I think I could trust

seems less attractive because a federal law ruins the looks of the 1st page

of any business site by forcing u to stick an ugly taxation number in the middle

of it, even if you are trying to attract skinners! Yoicks!



In the States, and I don´t know anything about the U. K., so I looked around first

checking free or cheap offers by companies TESTED somewhere (which may not be a

good method either), finding reasonably priced locking and transfer offers not to

be free, the companies a bit small, each of them showing off with some features

the others really did not have and vice versa.



You probably already used the right WHO IS like tools, and I did not read all of your

links yet.



Still, imagine this:



2 or 3 years ago, when hijacking was a bit less severe, you open up some sites,

even lock some, u think, forget about exact details as to how much redirected

locked sites could cost you even if only redirected once or twice.



Only by trying to hijack them yourself, which may result in your being prosecuted,

you would know whether they are really locked, even if you pay for that feature.



Then a real hijacker pretending to be the new owner of the server only hijacks

all of your supposedly locked and unlocked sites and the old server.



Each time you try to find out whether the old company exists, instead you get a

page schemed by the hijacker looking as if the old company legally turned every

thing over to them.



Or they just go broke, the old company? German proverb, you can´t pull anything

out of a naked man´s pockets, even in court, most times.



Or while drinking beer, the old company really did agree on shoving everything

over to the new company, toasting to themselves in a pub. Or both companies

always belonged to the same jerks and are always reformed. The first company´s

only purpose is to shanghai you to their more expensive next company.



Who says the new company really owns you instead of having hijacked you. A THIRD

company could be the new owner, not the hijacker, even if the OLD one REALLY

closed down at all.



If I could afford it, I would test my stuff unlocked, locked, plus always backup

anything I update on my own computer, and may even have 1 or 2 other companies

with similar locked and unlocked looks.



Which is all time and dough consuming. Guess I will be asking more experienced

US domain or subdomain runners what they recommend. Which is not always what

they use themselves, if they are good, especially if not commissioned by their tip.



Wonder which tests are more neutral and acknowledged. Hope you are not hijacked

and keep good records of future terms you agree on. Free redirecting might be

getting a bit more scarce even in good offers. I wonder. Thanks for your

experiences!