Transferring Domains - Day 7

Last night I noted that I couldn’t turn off private registration for ranchero.com — the option just didn’t appear. So I emailed support.

Support replied this morning: she told me I don’t have private registration for ranchero.com, so there would be no option to turn it off.

I replied with info from a whois query which clearly shows privatized information rather than the expected information. (For instance, the address is listed as Drums, PA, which is pretty far away from Seattle, WA.) Somehow ranchero.com’s info is private.

Could it be that because the domain is old (1997) it’s in some rare special-case category, and some code recognizes it as having private registration and other code — including the admin tools that customer support uses — doesn’t? And, if that’s the case, what will it take to fix it? And how long will that take?

Well, I’m being anxious without evidence. The answer is probably simpler. It may even just be a caching thing, and some patience would see it cleared up.

I note that I’m a week into this. Transferring two domains is a seemingly easy thing, and yet it’s as complex and time-consuming as I feared. My guess is that the transfers are a week away from being completely finished.

I’ll update this post if anything else happens today.

Update 10:45 am: I heard back from support just a few minutes after sending email. The issue was that private registration had been purchased using the technical contact ID rather than the primary ID.

So she turned off private registration, and it appears that whois queries are already returning the expected result.

I should be able to initiate the transfer of ranchero.com now.

In case anyone from Network Solutions is reading this: I won’t name the support person except by the initials S.H. (Since she’s not a public figure.) She deserves a gold star, a pat on the back, and a raise. She’s good.

Update 11:30 am: I initiated the transfer of ranchero.com to Hover. The Hover website says the ETA is February 2 (same as inessential.com).

The hard parts should be over — I don’t expect to have to communicate with Network Solutions support any more, though I will return to their site to see how much of my info I can delete. (The main thing to delete is any credit card info they may have saved.) (I won’t do this until after the transfer is complete.)

I’ll also have to make sure the settings for DNS servers migrate to Hover. (My domains use Dreamhost’s DNS servers.)

So I’m just waiting now.