by
markf » Tue Mar 11, 2014 12:36 pm
Sent to ICANN
Grretings,
This has been an ongoing saga, I will try to be brief, but, I can make no guarantees. First, I have been a sonic.net customer for 18 years. This incident forces me to end my business relationship with sonic.
On Saturday, March 8, 2014 I noticed TribTrash.org [my site] was not resolving. I telephoned my provider [sonic.net] to see why. The first telephone call resulted with more questions. The tech support had no idea why the site/domain failed to resolve. All my hosting and registration fees were paid. I attempted to reset the DNS by removing the hosting and reestablishing the hosting. Changing the configuration and reestablishing the configuration.
I made a second call to sonic.net a few hours later when this was ineffective. The tech support was still at a loss as to why the domain failed to resolve.
I telephoned sonic.net the next day, Sunday, March 9, 2014 to see if perhaps somebody else might know more. I spoke with another sonic tech and was told that Tucows, Inc., the registrar deactivated the domain because I did not respond to a verification email that was sent via opensrs.net [Tucows]. I did not respond because I never received the email.
The email was/is spam; sent with forged headers from a company I have no business relationship with and was dropped.
I set up another email address. Mistakenly I used the domain that was deactivated, not realizing at the time that without any DNS the email wasn't going to work either. When I realized a little while later why I was not receiving the verification email I telephoned sonic.net back and logged into my account a set the email address to an email address I knew was valid because the domain had valid DNS.
I attempted to have a sonic staff member resend the email at this point. The sonic employee accused me of being rude and told me he would "let the go go", hang up. I reiterated that they resend the verification email to the current email address in the domain contact. I never received any verification email.
During this time I attempted to contact Tucows, Inc., a couple of times using the telephone number on their website. The telephone number was not for Tucows, the telephone number was for opensrs.net.
The first attempt I was disconnected because none of the options applied to my needs. The second attempt I used the reseller's option and spoke with an individual that explained to me that he could not fix the problem, Then he could fix the problem, but, only if I was a reseller.
This went on for some time.
Finally I called ICANN to see if I had any recourse. When I spoke to ICANN I was given another telephone number that is supposed to be Tucows, Inc. Instead, when I called after hours last night, the telephone number returned a busy signal. This could be to prevent filling the voice mail or could have been done for a number of reasons.
Note:
I did eventually receive the Verification email, but, only
after I initiated the transfer of my domains from sonic.net
to clickhost.net and after I initiated the transfer of my
domain registrations from Tucows to a new domain registrar.
I asked opensrs.net and sonic if clicking on the verification
would create any problem with the transfer of the domains.
Opensrs.net, i.e. Tucows refused to provide any answer
what-so-ever and sonic did not have a conclusive answer.
I telephone sonic again this morning, Tuesday, March 11, 2014 and the company tha answered was opensrs.net. I asked the individual that answered if they fielded telephone calls from domain owners instead of the resellers and was told "not usually".
My site was still not functional this morning even though the domain had been resolving since yesterday. It was only after I migrated the hosting to the new company that my site reflects the content I created and posted.
I have no direct business relationship with Tucows. I do not pay them directly, I do not contact them directly, I simply have nothing to do with Tucows yet they saw fit to deactivate my domain and provide no way to resolve this. The business relationship with Tucows is with my provider. I pay my provider, my provider pay them.
A wholesaler does not have the right to pull any product out of my hands that I purchased at a local store that they may supply.
