A Web hosting company runaround

Dana wrote to the Gripe Line with a tale of woe regarding a Web hosting company. “I administer the Web site of a hair salon in Manhattan,” she explained. “One year ago, the salon’s domain name registrar — Mapname.com — demanded $80-per-domain renewal for the two domain names the previous site administrator had let lapse. The company claimed that the domain renewal itself was $7.95, and that the balance of the $80 was a ‘late fee.’

“We tried switching registrars, but this one wouldn’t let us get the EPP code that is necessary to do that. I thought I was being stupid when I couldn’t follow their instructions. So I Googled ‘Mapname.com switch to another registrar’…and found others with the same problem. The company provides lousy service — and overcharges for it. And then they, apparently, withhold the transfer code that makes it easy to get away from them. We can log in, and there’s information all over the place about transferring domain names to them, but none to get away from them. They claim it’s there, but it isn’t.”

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I forwarded Dana’s plea to Mapname.com and got back a rather strange e-mail — via a Yahoo address.

“The customer let her domain name to expire 2 times,” said the e-mail. “Our system sends multiple renewal notifications starting 180 days in advance. When the domain expires we have to pay to the registry to redeem the domain name. In 2007, the customer renewed late and had to pay the redemption fee. Why wait to renew till after the expiration date 2 years in a row?”

The letter then claimed — at length — that Mapname had provided Dana with everything she needed to transfer away from the registrar and asked several questions: “And yet, as of today, the customer still did not transfer this domain name away. Why??? Who is the customer and why should we sponsor this domain name for free??? Please explain! We do not know the answers to our questions. Do you know?”

That struck me as odd. Dana is Mapname.com’s customer and it seemed a simple matter to ask her who she is or why or even to just call her and help her find the EPP codes. But since it was easy enough for me to ask Dana why she “did not transfer this domain name away” (her e-mail address was right there in all this correspondence), I did. She said she still can find no EPP codes anywhere on the site, in the member’s pages, on the FAQs, or in any of the correspondence from Mapname.com. She sent screen shots of the Members Area configuration pages and the Transfer pages. “As you can see,” she said, “there is NO mention of ‘Here’s the EPP code you’ll need to transfer away.'”

And then Dana asked, “Why don’t they just send me the code to get out of their service rather than telling me to log in and try things that simply don’t work?”

My question: How hard is it to contact a customer directly and solve their problem? Is that more trouble than writing a long, inscrutable e-mail meant to portray the service provider as victim?

Got gripes? Send them to Christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.