- Impact
- 3
We've used Dotster for many years. They were never the cheapest, but the website was simple and reliable (NOT Flash or related GUI toys), service quick, and things just worked.
Unfortunately that is no longer the case. Over the last couple of months they've been transitioning to a new "VDECK" control panel which is glitzy and flashy (and slow and no longer usable by some of our older management stations). But the real trouble is they changed DNS servers from 'nameresolve.com' to their own ns1 and ns2.dotster.com.
We have two accounts with them, one a customer specific and one general. The general account got 'transitioned' 2 weeks ago, the customer account last week.
In BOTH cases every domain had its authoritative DNS switched to the Dotster servers (or another pair owned by Dotster) but the A records were all changed to some default set that pointed EVERYTHING, email, web, imap, etc AND a wildcard, to Dotster servers instead of to the actual servers. Websites pointed to a link page, email (initially) was getting blanket accepted by their server (as of last week it is all rejected).
Only secondary DNS records were copied (MX and CNAME); the A records were all skipped or overwritten. So since we used FQHNs for the MX records, and those A records vanished, the wildcard A record matched them and sent email to the wrong place.
After manually updating all the records in the first account's domains, I decided to check late that night to see how propagation was going and found all the bad info was still being provided; logged on to the account and found that they had OVERWRITTEN all our changes and put the bad data back in the DNS records. Another support call and manually changing again, and that account's domains' DNS have been ok since.
Last week they transitioned the customer account and its domains, same thing happened. Third service call, and manually reconfigure those three domains. By end of day Friday all was well. Then this weekend stuff started being misdirected again; we checked the records Monday morning, and the SAME thing happened again; all our reconfigs were overwritten by the SAME WRONG DEFAULT SET of A records. Service call #4. Manually reconfig it all again. Escalate to higher tier to find out WTH is going on. Now waiting for propagation again, as well as a response.
This is terribly disappointing. Dotster was a fine registrar but this level of fumbling and repeated errors has definitely put them in the 'NO GO' column. I expect we'll be pulling out to another registrar (which I'll be researching here) within the next few weeks...
Unfortunately that is no longer the case. Over the last couple of months they've been transitioning to a new "VDECK" control panel which is glitzy and flashy (and slow and no longer usable by some of our older management stations). But the real trouble is they changed DNS servers from 'nameresolve.com' to their own ns1 and ns2.dotster.com.
We have two accounts with them, one a customer specific and one general. The general account got 'transitioned' 2 weeks ago, the customer account last week.
In BOTH cases every domain had its authoritative DNS switched to the Dotster servers (or another pair owned by Dotster) but the A records were all changed to some default set that pointed EVERYTHING, email, web, imap, etc AND a wildcard, to Dotster servers instead of to the actual servers. Websites pointed to a link page, email (initially) was getting blanket accepted by their server (as of last week it is all rejected).
Only secondary DNS records were copied (MX and CNAME); the A records were all skipped or overwritten. So since we used FQHNs for the MX records, and those A records vanished, the wildcard A record matched them and sent email to the wrong place.
After manually updating all the records in the first account's domains, I decided to check late that night to see how propagation was going and found all the bad info was still being provided; logged on to the account and found that they had OVERWRITTEN all our changes and put the bad data back in the DNS records. Another support call and manually changing again, and that account's domains' DNS have been ok since.
Last week they transitioned the customer account and its domains, same thing happened. Third service call, and manually reconfigure those three domains. By end of day Friday all was well. Then this weekend stuff started being misdirected again; we checked the records Monday morning, and the SAME thing happened again; all our reconfigs were overwritten by the SAME WRONG DEFAULT SET of A records. Service call #4. Manually reconfig it all again. Escalate to higher tier to find out WTH is going on. Now waiting for propagation again, as well as a response.
This is terribly disappointing. Dotster was a fine registrar but this level of fumbling and repeated errors has definitely put them in the 'NO GO' column. I expect we'll be pulling out to another registrar (which I'll be researching here) within the next few weeks...