Dotster www.Dotster.com

After a recent migration, Dotster managed to take our website and email down for 11 days! Bearing in mind we are an E-Commernce company and its the 2 weeks before christmas!

We have phoned and emailed every day since it wen't down and haven't had any responce.

Apalling is not the word, steer clear!

I bought a domain from Fortunecity in around 2008. Fortunecity was then taken over by Dotster, and my renewal notice came up in 2010.

I tried to renew through the Dotster control panel, but was unable to. So I contacted customer services....after a lengthy discussion, I ended up sending the below email to [name removed] on 9th November 2010:

Hi,

I thought you'd like to know I am leaving Dotster for the following reason:

I paid to have my account renewed on 16th October. I heard nothing, so assumed all was well until I started getting warnings from Nominet that my domain had not been renewed and was in danger of being suspended in the near future.

I wrote to your customer care and asked them to sort this out immediately and got a response saying that my request had been forwarded to the relevant department, and I could call customer care on their helpline if I had any further problems.

All went quiet again, and again I thought things had been sorted until I got yet another warning from Nominet saying I now only had 7 days left to renew my domain.

I again wrote to your customer care, after checking that the money had indeed left my bank account and Dotster had been paid for your services. I received an email stating that the account needed to be renewed manually, and I could call customer care if I had any further questions.

Being somewhat suspicious by now that your customer care might be incompetent, I wrote again immediately asking WHEN my account might be manually activated and was told I had to call customer care for this to be possible!

Since I have already paid for my account and Dotster has received the money, I can see no possible reason why I would need to spend further money making a call to your customer care department to activate an account for which you are supposed to provide the services and for which you have already received payment. So I am leaving your company and having my account closed down on the ground that there is clearly a significant degree of incompetence within your company and I no longer trust them to manage my account properly.

I hope that they can manage the close down procedures and refund of my payment without incident??

I have forwarded the correspondence below so that you can investigate and hopefully improve your company.

Yours,

Well, the email got through to him and he passed it on to his minions and I was eventually contacted by someone else, who apologised and gave me a free domain renewal as well as promising that he had trained the customer service personel involved to ensure this didn't happen again.

So I accepted the apology and stayed with the company thinking to give them a second chance.

6th December 2012, here I am in the same position again, only worse. See my email to customer services below, which I have reproduced in full. This time, my domain has been suspended and my emails to Dotster management are not getting through (I guess they made them harder to guess!). I have not had my money back so far, in fact, Dotster is claiming they have no record of the transaction!!!! AVOID THIS COMPANY. They are incompetent at best and thieving scoundrels at worst.

Since you have moved me to the new system, I see all my tickets have disappeared. So by way of reminder:

5th October, ticket number 01649759, I asked you to renew my domain name and gave you my credit card number.

14th October, Invoice #15417604 I received notice that you had charged me for renewing my domain name Total:109.45

15th October, the money left my credit card account ref: DOT DOMAINREGISTRATION

7th November, I received notice from Nominet that my domain had not been renewed and was due to be suspended.

8th November Case number: 01745045 I asked you to sort this out as soon as possible

15th November I received notice from Nominet that my domain name has been suspended.

Case Number: 01762609 I let you know what had happened and asked for a refund of my payment and cancellation of account as I don't wish to be with you anymore

26th November, I received a comment on case number 01745045 (which I opened on 8th November!!) , which I am quoting below

"Thank you for contacting support, unfortunately after reviewing your billing history I don't see any record of you trying to renew your services. Since we never received payment for your domain or your services it would not be our fault for your domain being down. Furthermore since your hosting and domain registration have expired there would be nothing to refund. At this time no further action is required and I will be closing the case. Thank you and have a great day."

I opened yet another case number 01776995 pointing out that you may have lost the history, but I still have it and I want my money back. I attempted to send an email as well, but have not heard back from either case.

Please note that I have kept all my emails and statements and have a full history of this, so will be taking legal action if you do not refund my payment in full. I have also posted a record of my dealings with you on the internet so other potential customers will have been warned.