Network Solutions [sic]

Back last year, I revealed here that I’d spent more than $4000 over the years for domain name registration services, all of it to Network Solutions.

Network Solutions used to be a godawful horrible company. When I went to register my first domain name with them back in 1995 — digitalisland.com — it took weeks for them to update their files. Their customer service was unusually horrible. They’ve gotten better on the speed front — most domain name changes happen within an hour or so now — but their customer service has slid even further into a hole of unhelpfulness.

Mostly this hasn’t bothered me all that much, and when it does, it’s only at the yearly rewnewal time. But recently they’ve “updated” [sic] their website — perhaps because they’ve been consumed by VeriSign — and it’s now such a non-functional, poorly-designed mess of a tool that I can’t abide being their customer any longer.

So today I started the process of switching all of my .com and .net domain names to a small Edmonton called Trinic that a reader of this site suggested. I used them earlier this year to register Reinvented.info and I got a good feeling. Their system is simple and uncluttered: most operations can be performed in a click or two. And when I ran into a small snag — turned out not to be their fault — with my .info registration and emailed them, they actually emailed me back.

My only complaint with their systems is that their credit card payment gateway has a tendency to throw CGI timeout errors, which is disconcerting. Their website explains that this means that your payment has actually ben processed. But I’m always left wondering. I hope they fix this problem soon.

In the meantime, I’m much happier dealing with a small Edmonton company than the Behemoth that Network Solutions has been become.