I’m finally consolidating all of my domains onto A Small Orange. I had never really appreciated how incredibly painful Network Solutions makes it to transfer out of their clutches. My dad setup dezendorf.com and dezendorf.net with them in 2000 – back when domains were actually expensive and somewhat rare to own. Simply due to time issues and hassle, they were left there for years.

Recently, I moved the dezendorf.com domain over to a Google Apps domain, and loved the switch. Real, usable webmail? Yes please! A little while later, my dad wanted to move the dezendorf.com web hosting to something more reasonable, and I told him I’d park it on my ASO account, where I host gurucollege.net and gurufoto.net. They’ve been great to me ever since I bailed out on 1and1, who doesn’t get a link, as they provide crappy, unreliable services for elevated prices.

I took dezendorf.com’s hosting over totally, but I’d left the domain name on Network Solutions, as it was easier at the time, and I figured that I would move it later (once my dad’s hosting plan had run out). Many months later, after lots of ups and downs (life changes, kids, etc), my dad asked me again if I could transfer all the domains over to ASO so he could be done with it once and for all. I realized that Network Solutions was charging him a lot for the services, most of which he didn’t use or really understand. It’s expected – Network Solutions hard-sells you on useless crap you don’t need, because they are all a bunch of scumbags.

Yes, scumbags. Today is November 10th, 2012. I started the process of moving the domains dezendorf.com and dezendorf.net over from Network Solutions to A Small Orange on the 1st of November. They are just now actually transferring. There were hoops after hoops to jump through – the unlock code for the domains, for example, are ONLY emailed to the contact on file. The contact on file is an internal email redirect for NetworkSolutions, which points at your email address. Apparently, if you don’t have an account with NetworkSolutions, the email silently fails to send, and nobody gets notified.

After days of dealing with them, ASO finally got them all sorted out. And they sat on the domains for another 4 days before actually transferring them, at 9:30 AM on a Saturday morning. So now I’m in the process of actually moving everything to the right places and making sure DNS is set correctly. As a side effect of all of this, I’m going to make dezendorf.net an alias to dezendorf.com in terms of email, so [email protected] and [email protected] are synonymous.

TL;DR:

Don’t use Network Solutions for anything. They make it so painful to leave that it’s not worth doing anything with them, ever.