So a couple of weeks ago I had some big frustrations with Discount Domains. Essentially it came from the fact they've gone from a small local office where when you rang you spoke to a network engineer of sorts to a company with an off shore help desk and that meant I was banging my head on the wall trying to convince them THEY had a problem where they kept pointing fingers. It took the same fault occurring with another national ISP (Spark) who at first they still pointed the finger at before they finally got it escalated and realised it was a configuration issue with their DNS software blocking our largest ISP's for too many queries. I've up till now found them very good to deal with but this was too frustrating and cost a lot of time.

Role forward to today where I had two clients ring with DNS issues who were both with 2DAY / Free Parking. Again, 2day were brilliant many years back, they got bought by Free Parking and never completely consumed. Not sure exactly the fault but something happened with the 2DAY.COM domain today which meant that any domains using NS1.2DAY.COM as their DNS Servers had big issues - They've fixed it now, not sure what the exact cause was but I'm picking its as a result of multiple layers of purchases meaning someone dropped the ball on the 2DAY.COM domain not realising it still had some significance as Free Parking had never completely rolled the 2DAY clients into their own system.

I had it in my head Kordia owned Free Parking - Maybe they did and later sold to Digiweb, maybe that was always incorrect. Today I find that (I know this actually happened in November but I'm slow to it) now Digiweb was purchased by Dreamscape which is the company that Crazy Domains is part of. Not sure if they purchased the whole of Umbrella or just their domain registrar arm (Free Parking, Discount Domains, Domains4Less and Openhost).

So the helpdesk you get for any of the digiweb group of companies now looks like its the same helpdesk you get for Crazy Domains and that's a lot of different companies and platforms for someone on the other side of the world to support with a flow chart.

I moved my Discount Domains domains over to Metaname (28 of them - Not massive but a number) and have never looked back.

Interested to hear how others are getting on?? Its always a recipe for disaster when a company buys its competition but them doesn't fully integrate things and its made worse when they are then purchased by someone else. Hopefully there is a play afoot to integrate management of all of the DNS Servers and platforms but it must be a nightmare after multiple layers of mergers and purchases.

I think of Vodafone with this where they had Ihug's mail and DNS servers, Paradise mail and DNS servers, ClearNET's mail and DNS Servers and in the end they gave up on email altogether (Realistically I can understand why more and more an ISP based mail system is flawed). I had to get some DNS updated on a Paradise registered domain and I had to be put through to a specific team - It really felt like it was two guys in a basement in Wellington still managing the old Paradise servers.

My dislike of Crazy Domains isn't huge - It works ok but a lot of people buy there as it seems so cheap - Unless you actually need to do something with that domain in which case you need to activate an add-on if you want to edit DNS records yourself etc and suddenly their pricing is run of the mill. 

Also they have a system where the DNS servers you use a different if you just have a domain and DNS Plus or if you have hosting services. Had a client who let their web hosting lapse but still wanted the DNS Plus but because the hosting lapsed so did the DNS records on the hosting DNS servers so their mail started bouncing. 

Only had to login and change the DNS servers and then create the records there but you'd think that kind of thing would be automated or better still unnecessary.

So who does that leave if you want an independent Domain registrar to do simple DNS Zone editting.

I've gone Metaname and they've been exceptionally good but not sure if they want end user / company business for odds and sods as then they are likely to get lots of calls for silly issues (Although I'll admit I emailed a few times on things I should have seen with my own eyes on day 1/2 of shifting 28 domains - Since then fully auto).

Would you go 1st domains as a recommendation for end users getting the odd domain?

Interested to hear what others thoughts are.