Network Solutions Sucks Big Fat Honking Weenies (dot com)

This is the story of a domain name.

In the summer of 2006 I was involved in a startup company which shall remain nameless. We registered the domain name for the company with Network Solutions. The company's CEO (not me) was set up as the owner of the NetSol account.

A few months later we entered into negotiations to partner with a major multinational corporation with a well known brand. In anticipation of the partnership we registered some additional domain names which incorporated the name of the brand. But the partner wanted to keep the fact that we were in negotiations secret, so we needed to conceal the fact that these new domain names were owned by our CEO.

We tried various things. We tried to change the owner of the account. That didn't work. We tried to make the registrations private. That didn't work. So we tried to set up a new account under a different name and transfer the domains into that new account.

It turns out that Network Solutions (at least as far as I could ascertain at the time) would not allow you to establish a new account without actually registering a domain name. So I needed a dummy domain name to register that would never actually get used (and presumably would never be seen by anyone). The domain name I chose in that moment of extreme frustration was networksolutionssucksbigfathonkingweenies.com (which I am amused to note is "coming soon").

I proceeded to start the process of transferring the domains into this new account, but there was some kind of snag (I don't recall exactly what it was any more) so I had to call Network Solutions customer service. I explained to them what was going on, that I was trying to transfer a domain from one account to another and it wasn't working. But when they noticed the domain that was already in the receiving account all hell broke loose. They froze both accounts and sent the whole matter to NetSol management for review.

So there we were with our butts (or at least our branded domain names) hanging out in public for everyone to see, and a potential deal with a major partner at risk of falling through just because Network Solutions couldn't take a joke. It took several weeks to clear the matter up. Thankfully, no one noticed, and the deal went through.

But during those weeks, while I was sweating, I registered the domain network-solutions-suck-big-fat-honking-weenies.com (with hyphens) with DomainSite. I did it mainly to vent. I never intended to use that domain, just as I never intended to use the original hyphen-free domain.

Until now.

Network Solutions has been engaging in so many slimy business practices that I feel they need to be taken to task. And what better venue to do it in than this one. So to kick things off, here are just two reasons why Network Solutions suck big fat honking weenies.

Stay tuned for more. There seems to be a lot of fodder for this blog at the moment.