Negative Experience Trying to Renew Domain

[jspittler]

I am in the midst of a very frustrating experience renewing my domain name with Jaguar/AletiaNIC and I wanted to share my experience and also, perhaps get some suggestions as to how to resolve it. I started with Aletia and, of course, migrated to Jaguar when Aletia changed hands. I always paid about $10 annually for my domain name (both before and after the ownership transition).

About a year ago, after helping my dad set up his own website on Jaguar, I noticed that new accounts had their domain name account stuff set up with AletiaNIC which had a very nice user interface which I didn't have. Soon thereafter, I asked Jaguar support if I could have my domain changed to AletiaNIC rather than whatever I had before, so that I could better control my domain, if needed. So far, so good...

About a month and a half ago, I received notification that my domain was about to expire. I logged into my AletiaNIC account and went through the renewal process. I discovered that they charged me about $30 to renew.

I initiated a request for help through the AletiaNIC help process and that is when things got painful. In short, support was very unhelpful in helping me understand what went wrong, much less solving the problem. They pretty much told me that they weren't managing my domain, so they couldn't help me.

I tried to explain that I had always had my domain managed through the "default" Aletia/Jaguar service, and had always been charged $10 before, and that I renewed through the AletiaNIC website, and was trying to understand how it was that they couldn't help me. In some of the back and forth e-mails, I tried to ask questions that would help me understand the situation better, but they pretty much ignored these questions and just said that they couldn't help me. (A typical question was "I renewed my domain through AletiaNIC. How is it that you now can't help me?"). From reading some of the other posts here, I now have some understanding on how this might be the case, but why couldn't they have explained it?

Finally I contacted enom and they told me that my account was directly through them, and not a reseller. I have no idea how this became so, but in any case, why couldn't AletiaNIC told me this specifically? Especially when I told them that I always have had things done through them.

To make matters worse, I was on an extended vacation when all this was happening, with limited access to the internet. When I sent an e-mail to support, I would get a return e-mail the next day askind me to confirm that I really sent the e-mail in question (my email would be deleted if I didn't respond in 72 hours). This meant that even if I was able to access my e-mail every day (which I wasn't), turnaround time for each e-mail request was three days. In at least one case, I wasn't able to confirm my sent e-mail within the alloted time and needed to resend the e-mail again.

I am still trying to resolve this situation. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Judd

[jason]

Open a support ticket with JPC. When you contacted support through the AletiaNic site you were probably contacting eNom support and not JPC. As for the account info, anyone with an eNom account can log into AletiaNic. The AletiaNic site is really only a customized frontend to eNom.com. If you have an eNom account with ENom directly or with another reseller other than AletiaNic, you can log into AletiaNic and manage your domains, but you'll get the pricing for the reseller (or eNom direct) that you created the account with.

--Jason

[jspittler]

Jason,

Thanks for the comment regarding the AletiaNIC front-end having the capability to renew domains that are NOT registered through AletiaNIC.

I had eventually figured out that this is how it worked, but WHY couldn't JaguarPC have told me this??? It would have saved me a great deal of frustration, and would have helped me begin to track down the problem one step at a time.

OK, yesterday I opened another support ticket with JPC... guess what... someone said they would forward my question to the appropriate department and then the ticket was closed a few minutes later... without comment.

JPC support seems to be treating me like a pest and are now just ignoring my correspondence with them. My correspondences with them are not rude or threatening, but are persistant. They do not in any way give me any information which will help me track down the problem on my own.

I am really surprised. My experience with JPC in the past has been very positive and I have recommended them to a few people. Now I have a legitimate problem that I am trying hard to understand and resolve and they are blowing me off.

Judd

[JPC-Les]

Hi Judd,
I remember your ticket and I did reply to your ticket yesterday and I see now that the reply is blank in the system. I must have made a mistake in the ticket system and I apologize for that.

Your ticket is being answered right now again as well.

Regards,
Les

[jspittler]

Thanks for working with me on this, Les.

It looks like things are now set up so that JaguarPC/AletiaNIC is again my domain registrant. (It somehow got transfered to the default eNom registration within the last year).

Unfortunately, I remain disappointed at the overall support experience for this particular issue. Mainly I wish JPC would have paid attention to my comments that I never registered my domain with anybody other than them and that if they didn't see me as being registered with them, then maybe there was an unusual situation going on. Instead they just said things like "sorry, your domain isn't registered with us, so we can't help you". I had repeatedly asked how it was possible that that I wasn't registered through them even though I paid for the domain through the AletiaNIC website. They never responded to this question. (I now understand that this is possible, since the AletiaNIC website is just a custom front-end to eNom, but this was never explained to me, despite my questions.)

I am pretty certain that the support staff at JPC doesn't have an unlimited amount of time to spend on each support request, but I really feel that they could have spent a bit more thought/effort with me on this issue. I certainly would have appreciated any questions from them to help them understand the problem better, and certainly would have appreciated it if they had answered my questions also intended to understand the problem better.

Anyway, my reason for writing this is not so much to badmouth Jaguar, with which I have had a great experience with prior to this issue, but rather to help them understand that I think they really screwed up this time, and I hope that they can learn something from my feedback.