It is always a pleasure for me to read his tickets.

Here is an excerpt:

Heya Sascha!

I have 3-4 domain names I’m not using right now but 2 are up for
renewal the 8th of next month and I want to transfer them all them to
XXXX. Do I sign them up with you guys first and then set the domains
to transfer on their end?

Also I noticed my spambox is always empty [YAY!] and when I went in
Cpanel to check the configuration it said: Invalid license please
contact assp deluxe for cpanel support. (er 11b). [Boo?]

And just as I tried to send you an email through my mail server it
said the connection failed w/the SMTP server. That might be me
although I didn’t change any settings I’m aware of so I’m sending this
via webmail.

-Vincent Navarino

PS. You ever notice when people say how are you at the end of an email
that it seems they’re being a tad disingenuous? Not me. It’s just that
I remember last what’s important most.

My response:

Howdy,

for the domain registrations, I will need to know the EPP code. It is a little green slimy sticker at the bottom of the domain name (you need to turn it upside down and back). Sometimes it also says Authorization code.
I will look into the ASSP license.

Ciao
Sascha

And his follow up response:

Methinks someone is making fun of me with the sticker thing. Which
come to think of is not hard. So I printed out my domain info on my
laser printer, flipped the page up and back as instructed and there
was no EPP code. You mentioned the sticker was green, a color my
monochrome laser printer cannot produce. So I printed it out on my
brother’s color inkjet printer but sadly he was out of GREEN. There
were only 2 cartridges in his printer, so I figured it was the 3 color
cartridge he needed. It had 3 dots on it, none of them green but since
the other one had a black dot and I know black is not the new green it
had to be the 3 dot one needed.

My brother sensing my need to do this, decided to be a super-prick
although he lacks the foundation for such a thing, forced me to pay
$35 at Office Max to get the color cartridge required to print the EPP
code. So $35? and many hammer blows to my brother’s forehead later, I
cleaned up all the blood, dumped his body in a nearby creek and
printed out the domain info again.

No green sticker! I tried my sister’s laser printer (who by the way
was happy to help me with my brother’s body disposal) and still no
green EPP sticker.

Sensing you might have been mocking me with the whole EPP sticker
info, I did a quick Google search and found out for domain xfers you
need an Authorization code. To be sure, I emailed them about how to
find the green EPP sticker on the back of my domain name and they
started laughing at me asking if I knew Sascha. I tried to lie my way
out of it but they weren’t fooled. They offered to make up some green
EPP stickers for my domains and mail them to me but at this point I
was feeling a tad foolish and silly. Sure I was up $20, my
sister-in-law paid me $55 for the ex-hubby thing but the laughing from
those server people made me sad. The gratuitous puppy-kicking and
baby-slapping I did later made me happy enough to make this reply to
you. Well plaid, sir. Well plaid.

The 2 domains I want to xfer now are with 1&1 hosting. I have a
navarinos.com with godaddy but that’s not up for renewal until later
this year. The domains I’d like to xfer now are:

<snipped>

PS. Are the stickers really slimey?? -Vinny

The post Domain registrations and the little green slimy stickers appeared first on sascha.us.

Though my blog is supposed to have a few rants, I rarely have the feeling that I have to get on it to complain about something.

Today however, I witnessed the most stupid business decision ever.

I happened to provide search engine optimization services for a plastic surgeon living a few miles just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. My customer was not very internet-savvy and she was used to delegating internet related tasks to other people. Her own website was in fact made by one of her patients clients at the beginning of this millennium. So this former client even paid for her domain registration fees and they had the domain registered through Godaddy. Can you see where this is going? Yes, right, I have been there done that too many times: she lost contact with the person who registered the domain for her, the person in turn forgot to renew the domain and whoops, the website was offline. That alone is bad, especially when you consider Godaddy’s horrible customer support. What made it even worse was that she had a Google ad campaign running at that time and google delivered tons of ads that lead… yes, straight to internet nirvana.

Eventually, she noticed that she was paying for an ad campaign, but didn’t get any new referrals. The weeks after this incident were a nightmare. Godaddy was ridiculously slow and unwilling in helping her to get the domain name back online (were they hoping to collect the redemption fees?). Google punished her domain name so badly that she lost her pagerank, but she couldn’t even run new ad campaigns without having to pay a minimum of $10 per click. In 9 years of search engine marketing and optimization, I have never witnessed something like that.

So once the domain name was finally renewed, we moved it to our registration service for her. I ended up spending hours of my free time on the phone with Google support (they were totally clueless by the way, which clearly opposes the image we have of Google as the search engine giant that hires the most brilliant people in the industry), as I felt bad for the client, even though none of this was really our fault. In the end, someone from Google suggested that we register an alternative domain name for the client and start over from scratch with that name, as the old name was going to be punished for a few more months and there was nothing they could do for us.

A few months later, after we brought her websites to the top 10 worldwide Google search results with white hat SEO techniques for some of her important keywords, she decided that she would like to move on to another service provider. I looked at the work they were doing and I’d say they are passing the line between white hat and black hat SEO. Today we were informed that this new service provider is going to “take over the domain registration” and guess where she is going to have her domain name registered again?

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