Registrar hover.com gave my domain away via the phone
twitter.comDoesn't surprise me at all.
We used to have various domains at Hover too, but due to their incompetence we migrated all of our domains elsewhere (a few months ago).
Their incompetence:
1. [fairly minor] Something technical (!) is wrong with their logged-in customer portal, such that I could never properly access their Knowledge Base once logged in (various error messages). But working completely fine when logged out. Filed a support ticket about this 2 or 3 times, but it was always closed with something along the lines of "works for me".
2. [show stopper] We were having a problem with one of our domains, and it was getting close to expiry (a few weeks away). Attempting to contact their support about it (via email) a few times over a few days, and ... no response apart from "we got your ticket" type of thing (from rough memory).
Then tried via their "live chat", which never had anyone pick up.
So, made the decision to transfer all of our important domains away from Hover, as "zero response" isn't acceptable for important domains having issues.
About a month later (well after the original domain expiry period), their support finally responded with something along the lines of "sorry for the delay, we were super busy. What seems to be the problem?".
At which point migrating the rest of our domains (even unimportant ones) away from them was decided upon, then done.
It's a shame, as they used to be good (some years ago). My impression is they started out ok (with clueful staff/processes/etc), but went through some sort of cost-cutting/minimisation period after a while, during which their good staff left.
Thus, crap like this. :(
Someone called a hover.com CSR, and got them to reset my password on the phone. Think twice before you use them.
looks like mickey mouse operations on that registrar 'or' it's an inside job there.
one of the worst days I've ever had with technology in 25 years of engineering.
Who are good registrars these days? I'm with Enom, Namecheap, and DNSimple; Who should I be using and recommending to my clients? It's not surprising how much power a registrar can have; One of my clients just got burned badly by GoDaddy (and another one is about to and doesn't understand it yet).
EasyDNS (easydns.com) is working well for us, has the reputation of not automatically rolling over to legal threats, and they only have staff with a clue (important).
They're much more expensive than hover was, but when we need support we never have to deal with anyone technically clueless that's just trying to get off the phone/email/etc.