One of the first things I looked for when I started to get Plyplema Design off the ground was a place to host my customers domains.  As many people do I researched for what would be the cheapest option to purchase the .com.au domains, I wanted value for my money and couldn’t fathom what could actually go wrong.

I came across name.com.au and was immediately attracted to the $20 price tag.  I was still a little skeptical so read around on some popular forums and noticed mix reactions.  The common theme being that they are great when it works but an absolute pain when things go sour.

I took the plunge on purchasing this very domain.  The process was simple and the registration went through quickly without a hitch.  Setting up the nameservers was a little confusing but after some further reading I had it sorted in no time.  After 24hours the domain was up and I was wondering what all the fuss was about.

The next week I had to order a domain for a new client starting up his own business.  After my first experience I went to my name.com.au account fully confident and applied to register the new domain.  The application was as easy as the first time, but then everything seemed to go wrong.  The domain management said that registration failed.

I dug through the site and the help files to try and find out any clue as to what went wrong and how to fix it to no avail.  The only support offered was through an online ticketing system so I filled one out and was told that an confirmation email with a support ticket number had been sent through.  Nothing was received.  Luckily I stumbled across a support email address and sent one off hoping for a response the next day.  To my suprise the email bounced.

After waiting a day to see if the support ticket did make it through out of curiousity I pinged the failed domain and was amazed to see it respond and point to the name.com.au nameservers.  A whois was the next stop and all of the correct details were returned.  The domain was registered properly but the domain management software prevented access to change the configuration details such as nameservers.  The registrar from the whois was actaully Domaincentral.com.au so I tried to contact them both through email and phone.  The phone rings out to a call back service and the emails are never returned.  By this stage the money for the domain has been taken out of my account.

I am now stuck with a domain I can’t control with a provider who I can’t even get a response from to correct.   Does anyone have a Domain Registrar’s they would like to recommend for support and cost or maybe a contact for Name.com.au or Domaincentral.com.au?