How to transfer a domain away from a registrar that doesn't want to?

RegisterFly.com, Inc. 404 Main Street 4th Floor Boonton, NJ 07005 United States 973-404-8430 [email protected]

Icann's http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp.htm may not apply directly to your situation, but their goal with this policy is to deal with 'bad faith registration'. (id consider this a last resort.)

i reread your question, and by registrar initially i thought you meant a registrar like godaddy or enom, etc... now i think when you say 'registrar' you mean the 'person to whom the website is registered to' (which technically i think the word is 'registrant'). in which case you dont really need to switch companies, per se... it seems that you just dont know the login/password to change the dns settings so that you can change web hosts.... is this a fair assessment of your problem?

The official contact information for RegisterFly can be found http://www.internic.net/registrars/registrar-821.html on ICANN's InterNIC site. Try calling the number listed their. If that doesn't work, send a written request overnight to that address. If you still don't get a response, you could try ICANN's http://reports.internic.net/cgi/registrars/problem-report.cgi form, but frankly I don't think may not help much. If these suggestions don't work, consider having a lawyer send a demand letter on his or her law firm's letterhead.

Argh... "their" -> "there".

I just transferred a few domains away from one registrar and over to another. The authorization code you need was available online from the first registrar. I just logged into the account, and dug through the menus until I found "obtain authorization code." Have you tried logging into the Registerfly account and looking through the domain management tools for something similar? Even if you can't transfer the domain to another registrar, you don't need to do that first. As long as you can get into the registerfly account to change the name servers for the domain, you can point it at whatever web host you want, and deal with transferring registrars later. I say this because once you start a transfer, you cannot make any changes to the domain settings until the transfer completes, which can take up to 7 days.

When you say "no one has the username or password" are you referring to the host or the registrar? You can ignore the host completely at this point; once you transfer the domain you will effectively have complete control over its contents and so it doesn't matter whether the current host co-operates or not. What you need is the login credentials to the registrar's site. You need to log on to the account, set the "contact email" to a real address that you actually control, and then initiate the transfer. They will send the transfer code to the registered email. (In some cases you can get the transfer code directly from the registrar's site but it sounds like this is not one of them.) If you don't have the login details to the registrar, then you need to contact them directly and find out what sort of proof they need to establish ownership. They could require various sorts of identification and paperwork. It could be a real pain, but it's your best bet. (The next best bet is to just wait until it expires and re-register it, but that will fail if A) this needs to get done before then or B) it's set to auto-renew on somebody's credit card.)

I have a few domains with Registerfly, and it is possible to "unlock" the domain to move it. Does your customer have a user name and password to Registerfly? If so, they can go to "manage domains", then there's a link on the right side of the screen that says "domain lock". Once you click that you will see "Registry Lock Status" which is most likely checked. Uncheck this and you are free to move the domain.

Ah, I missed the "no one has the password" bit, sorry. Registerfly has a password recovery feature, but you need to know the email address that was used to set up the account. If the original developer is the one who had this, it's going to be tough going unless he's a decent enough person to help you out. Who gets the notices for domain renewal?