How to wrestle domain back from kaput reseller?

Life Technology
1

I’ve had a domain for several years. I like it. My website is quite popular and ranks well with the search engines. I had registered the domain name through a virtual hosting reseller. A year or so back they decided to switch to another upstream host that didn’t support some of the scripts I was relying on, so I moved to another host. Now my domain registration has expired and I cannot raise the old reseller. Their own domain has been locked for a few months so I assume they went belly-up. I’ve tried contacting the upstream registrar (enom) but so far they are fobbing me off with canned responses like these:

We don’t have the domain info. Only the reseller has it. Contact them.

and

We found the reseller to be responseful (is that even a word) and more than willing to help.

Of course emails to the reseller go unanswered.

So, what can I do? I put too much time and effort into this site to walk away and I have way too good a ranking in the engines to change domain names.

2

That sucks. You might try filling in the InterNIC Registrar Problem Report Form in the hope that the people who might be able to help might pay more attention to something forwarded from InterNIC. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up too much. I had to deal with InterNIC a few years ago, which was a lengthy, mafan process.

A Web search for “domain name forum” turns up some sites that might be of use.

3

In addition to what cranky laowai wrote, you might also want to backorder your own domain at enom.com/auctions/namejet_jump.asp for more info). If everything else doesn’t work, this will help you catch your domain before it becomes available to everyone.