Hover.com is the anti-Go Daddy

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-Jacquelin from Howell, MI.

Why and how did I become part of this?

I was a customer of Domain Direct, owned by TwoCows and without warning was dumped over to this new Hover thing with no warning or explaination or direction. I stumbled my way through the renewal process and later found out their is no hosting at the new "Hover".

So far it feels to me like someone went bankrupt and did a restart but I sure feel deveived by Domain Direct and Hover.

As a customer who was flipped from a previous registrar to Hover recently, All I can say is wow! I've never used a more stunning and mind boggling domain management website. It's certainly a "killer" , I'm transferring all my domains elsewhere because of Hover's interface.

From the comment above, it appears Hover is talking itself up. This marketing technic could land you in jail here in the UK. It's just not accepted anymore.

Ya, it sounds like Luke is an employee of hover.com. I just found out all my domains were transferred over to hover.com from domain direct. I've been a customer of domain direct for about 10 years. But I'm moving everything I have over to another company. And I'm recommending that all my web clients do the same.

The new hover.com site really sucks. They buried the email tech support option in the About Us section of the site. The have know general email or phone number to call. Only two of my nine domain passwords work. I managed to get the old domain direct number 866-337-8633 but I was on hold for an hour before I had to hang up. I was very unprofessional, the way they handled this change and I no longer trust them. My recommendation is to stay clear of these guys.

And Luke you may want to polish up your resume.

Sorry for the mis-spelled words in my last post... I was so mad when I wrote it... I didn't really stop to proof-read.

yes... still mad.

Hi everyone -

With any move of this scale, some people are going to find the transition difficult. I completely understand how moving to the new system and having to learn a new user interface and a new way of doing things. I totally get that.

I also understand that its been tough getting ahold of us for the last couple of days. In moving that many people from a system that they've been using for more than the last ten years (Domain Direct was first launched in 1997) we've caused a lot of people to ask a lot of questions. Answering those questions takes time. Where we would normally get back to people within 24 hours, its now taking us between 36-48. Whereas we would normally be able to pick up the phone within 3-6 minutes, hold times are now averaging about 15 minutes and spiking up to much longer than that at peak times.

Even something as simple as communicating the changes to our customers has been challenging. Many people have indicated that they didn't receive any of our notices we sent out about the transition. You'd be surprised at how many people have contact email addresses like "daffyduck@disneyland.com" or "11111@nospam.net" or have just plain opted out from receiving critical announcements. Yesterday, I sent out a followup note to about 450 customers who used one special feature, almost 100 of the messages bounced back to me as undeliverable.

There has been a lot of confusion about how to get in touch with us - with the move to Hover, we've added a link to the top right corner of every page that says "Help" - this will log you into our extensive customer service tools - Tutorials, FAQs, forums, our ticketing system and everything else you would need to get questions answered about our service. I will definitely make our contact phone number more prominent - as you point out, we're still taking calls on the old Domain Direct number, but I can easily ensure that the telephone number is more prominently placed in our support materials. We've also re-enabled email based ticketing support with the move to Hover. If you remember, about 18 months ago, we suspended this service when we moved to a new web-based ticketing system. Turns out that a lot more people like using email ticketing than they like using web based ticketing. We originally thought that preferences had changed, and we were wrong. We've learned from that and brought this feature back. If you have verified your email address with us from within your Hover account, you can send email to "help@hover.com" and your tickets will be tracked within your Hover account.

Brett - as far as your passwords issue goes, it sounds like you had unlinked domains in your Domain Direct profile. We can fix this and consolidate everything in your Hover account pretty quickly. Drop me an email to "ross@hover.com" with the specifics and I'll get someone to help you out.

Finally, I have no idea who Luke is. I suspect he was being sarcastic and someone else missed this. He doesn't work for us.

If anyone else has questions, please let me know.

Best regards,

Ross Rader

General Manager, Hover

Sorry Ross, I've been a client since inception and other than your single attempts for customer service the clients are pretty much on their own.

I'm thinking of starting a website to tell the truth about the level of NO CUSTOMER SERVICE at Hover. Just read the Tucows press releases and you'll see that they let go 15% of their workforce. I swear all of that came from the customer service end.

Ross is a one man show and he is simply overwhelmed by the Hover project. Don't expect to get any real service anytime soon.

There is something fishy about the whole thing. The new Domain Direct Hosting and Hover seem to be very clandestine about the changeover. And Ross, I do appreciate your honesty about the changes you regret however there should have been a full disclosure on the website main page of what was happening.

When you say "With any move of this scale, some people are going to find the transition difficult." you make it sound like this was something we where all involved with - we were not or was to everyone's benefit - it was not. In fact, judging by the postings there are many customers that have been lead astray. Even your own admission, however admirable, of not being able to contact customers still - tells us that there are many many more that have been caught up in this vortex of confusion and misdirection.

I'm making presuppositions here but I think that Ross is legit and trying, I just think the whole thing has been badly fumbled with Domain Direct and their demise.

There is no page (as there was on the DD site) tracking hits. Why not?

It was very important to me. I need to know how many people are visting my site.

Especially after reading this blog (albeit there are only a few comments, but they are current), I am not reluctant to say that I have transferred all my domains away from Hover several weeks ago. Today I checked my bank accounts and noticed a charge from Domain Direct. I tried calling, but was on hold for 30 minutes, at which time I had to hang up because I had a customer call. Should left it hanging on call waiting because I am sure that I would have still been on hold......

@kamwest - not sure why your trying to bring together a conspiracy. "Vortext of confusion and misdirection"? Wow. Quite the mouthful. I'd love to know how we could have better communicated with customers who didn't keep accurate email contact records on file with us. 15% of Tucows workforce was less than 20 people IIRC. 3 came from my team. As far as this being a one man show, I'd love to take credit for everything we're doing, but its just not the case. The team is about 3 times larger than it was when I took over, with about 5 times the number of customers. I apologize that our response times are less than satisfactory right now, but the team is well on their way to restoring service levels to a much more reasonable 24 response time.

@gripes - two reasons a) very few of our clients actually use this feature, and b) Google Analytics does a much more respectable job of providing these features. We're not keen on trying to reinvent the wheel or devote resources to projects that other companies already excel at. That said, we are looking at ways to integrate closely with Google Analytics to provide access to forwarding stats in a clean manner.

@Robert - hold times are up from our 3 minute average pre-upgrade. Sorry for the wait. Send me an email to ross@hover.com with your details and I'll have someone get in touch to work this out for you.

Well, no actually, I DON'T know what you mean when you imply that GoDaddy has charged ME any more than what I expected. $9.00 a year. They seem to sell some other services on their mess of a home page, but I don't bother with any of that. I started with Domain Direct nine years ago and moved all but two of my domain names over to GoDaddy over the last five years. I just used GoDaddy to do domain forwarding.

But I kept DomainDirect for two names because I used some extra services that GoDaddy charges extra for. "Ross Rader" responded to "gripes" that few clients used hit statistics. True, perhaps, but it was nice to have. What other services are now missing? I only wish I hadn't paid for FIVE years on one domain name through Domain Direct.

Ross this quote "Vortext of confusion and misdirection" did not come from me, it came from Mart.

As per my post, my intention was to state that you are the only person who responds on your support forum. Even that's scarce and when you're away there's virtually no response.

On a positive note, I'm glad to see the phone numbers back on the website. From what I can see you're getting about 500 support tickets a day and you must still be running 4-5 days behind because the main complaint is no response to tickets.

I saw the pictures of the DomainDirect support office and I can say i was less than impressed. It looked to be a very simply staffed operation. Maybe that has changed but from the level of current service I think probably not.

When you make system wide changes maybe it would be an idea to to hire extra staff for a while.

@kam - sorry about that. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

I tend to take care of a lot of the public stuff because I don't have enough detailed knowledge at a technical level to answer tickets precisely enough. I figure that I can add the most value by helping my team stay focused on what they do best by taking care of the more general issues. This happens most often with public posts, but I do regularly pitch in helping to answer specific questions of a more general nature that come to use via email or web, etc.

You are right, we are seeing a huge volume of questions coming our way. The main complaint is slow response, not no response. We just can't get to the questions quickly enough right now given current staffing levels, etc. We've moved tens of thousands of customers into a new environment, and rightly, they've got a lot of questions about how to get things done. Its a bit of a catch-22 for us - I don't think it is appropriate for us to outsource your questions to a third party, mainly because I think the experience will suck for you, so we're pretty much left to our own devices to answer your questions until the volume dies down.

I'm not sure what pictures you are referring to, but we don't run a typical call center environment for our team to work in. We don't have veal pens for them to work in, call quotas to fulfill, etc. because this breeds bad customer service habits. Everyone has a real desk and is encouraged to spend the time necessary to help the customer with their situation, resolve the issue and then and only then, to move onto the next customer. If it takes an hour to solve the problem, my folks will take the hour to help you. We're definitely not over-staffed, but I don't think that we're understaffed either. (I mean, I would love to have another 5 people in here today to help us with the backlog, but I wouldn't have work for them beyond the middle of next week and I really believe that we have an obligation to provide long-term opportunities to our staff. Hire/Fire is a typical call-center trap that kills morale and quality - I think we owe our customers and staff more than that).

Thanks again for the feedback - even though we've been at this for more than 10 years, we're learning new things every day, most times from dialogue just like this.

I forgot to add that we posted a customer bulletin addressing many of these concerns on our Help Forums earlier today.

http://help.hover.com/forums/13511/entries/20917

Finally, now you're talking

That's all we needed to hear, the link answers my questions and sets a timeline for when services should be restored to normal levels. You needed to do that a week ago so we could have an idea to what was going on.

Transparency is what you need so the clients know whats going on. If I know that tickets will be resolved in a timely manner in the future then I'm more likely to stick around. I can give you patience as long as you keep me (and by that I mean all of us) involved.

Thank you for the informative response

Still no phone number reachable from the front page.

Still sucks. Old number still in excess of 1 hour hold times.

Ross, for a company at this for 10 years, your customer support is the worst I have ever experienced. You wrote, "Where we would normally get back to people within 24 hours, its now taking us between 36-48." I am a netidentity email user and for my last two support tickets, the first reponse took 141 days (DAYS, not hours... DAYS) to get a response... in case you didn't catch that, 141 DAYS for support to get back to me. Hard to believe? Check ticket KEB-734841.

I recently submitted a new ticket (apparently I don't learn) for the SAME ISSUE and it's been 9 days with no response. ticket: UNQ-532223

Unless I get another 5 years credited to my account, I'm moving to gmail when it renews.

By the way, it's two days past the upgrade to Hover... and no Hover.

To everyone threatening to move your account elsewhere, why are you waiting? My gut starting saying "uh oh.." just prior to the transition to Hover. I gave them a chance, they started withdrawing support services, wait times got longer. All saying get out of Dodge!

"Unhappy" is moving to Gmail if a 5 year credit doesn't materialize. (and I'm hoping the DOW will be at 11,000+ by Friday)

Go straight to Google Apps basic NOW. It is free, it works and they have incredible FAQs, technical references, help pages etc. Set it up, log on to your Hover admin and point your MW records at Google.

Google provides every conceivable bit of information to transition seamlessly.

Don't delay, do it today. Rather than wagging a threatening finger at Ross and company. They couldn't care less.

I think you misread my comment ? I don't work for hover. I thought "mind boggling" and transferring all my domains elsewhere were pretty damning of Hover ?

Last ones transferred away from Hover today :)

I have tried in several ways to get any response from Hover - so far with no succes. My account is apparently not verified. Severel attempts to have another verification e-mail have resultet in absolutely no respones.

Sadly, last summer I payed for a two-year prolongation of my account when it still was Domain Direct. An now they threaten me to automatically renw my accont - and I am not allowed to log into my accont to change it. Do anybody know if the site is fraudulent

Quite simply - the Hover.com services suck ass. If you're someone with hundreds or thousands of domains, the service is an absolute nightmare. And I'm not sure they're not doing some illegal things. Example:

I had several hundred domains at IYD.com which was converted (unfortunately) to Hover. I recently moved a domain name over to Snapnames. And keep in mind that ALL of my domains with Hover are under what they call the "Domain Only" Package Type. Well, I received an email from Hover telling me that they successfully renewed that domain for me and charged my credit card 9 bucks. HOW DID THEY SUCCESSFULLY RENEW THE DOMAIN IF IT WAS ALREADY SUCCESSFULLY MOVED TO ANOTHER REGISTRAR SEVERAL WEEKS AGO??? Totally unacceptable, pathetic and probably illegal.

The response I got from Hover was that I needed to delete the domain from my account. Well, even if I wanted to go delete every frickin' domain that I move away from Hover out of my account to stop getting the annoying "Your domain is going to expire" emails (when the domains have already be moved to another registrar), it doesn't give Hover the right to charge me for a service that they simply CANNOT FULFILL due to the fact that the domain is now being serviced by another company.

@KJG - If you have thousands of domains, why are you using these guys? Get accredited yourself or get set up as a reseller.

It wasn't by choice - I was an IYD.com customer and TUCOWS (Hover) bought IYD. I was forced over... and yes, I've immediately migrated the majority of my domains off of Hover... and saw the mess that Hover is all along the way.

A couple of days ago I finally got a response from Hover, and after some cleaning up, my account seem to function to my satisfaction. Since I only have one domain, I will be staying for some time to see how everything works.

Single email forwarding accounts that were included with DomainDirect registrations are not included with Hover.com registrations since the transition. If you just want to be able to forward emails to existing accounts you must purchase five additional email addresses for $30./year, increasing total registration cost to approximately $45./year

WHAT A JOKE.

My domain is about to expire tomorrow. My admin contact is gone to ground and hover will not reply to my emails. All I want to do is give them money to renew the domain - yet they do not seem interested.

CANNOT WAIT TO GET AWAY FROM THIS COMPANY.

I am just tickled that they can move netidentity to hover and raise the price..WHAM!! You are now charging $10 per year more..and that is way more than I wanted to pay. Half the time my email has not been working properly. I have been getting all kinds of cool new errors. IMAP works when it wants to, I did open a support request and I too did not hear anything back as of yet...I am just ticked and maybe a 5 year credit will help. I am up for renewal in a few days...I have had this email address a long time and it will suck to give it up but I guess it will be all good eventually.

A reply for Pat - your expectation for a 5 year credit is a waste of time so don't get mad, but DO get even.

It takes about 25 minutes to move your email domain to Google, they charge $0.00 per year and they DO support IMAP. I set up an account for my wife with the pre-Hover Domain Direct and when Hover hoovered them up, the service and support went down the drain.

I moved her to Google about 7 months back and it has been smooth sailing.

So DO get even and take your business elsewhere - Hover will cease to be when their customers stop renewing.

Doug -

The conversation is much more vibrant over at our customer service forums. We're not actively staffing blog comments right now, simply because we're focused on bringing the customer service response times back to an acceptable level after the migrations. http://help.hover.com is where all the action is :-)

Domain Direct, IYD, Netidentity, each were 6-10 year old systems that provided different services, with different prices, etc. Each was due for an upgrade. Customers on those systems simply weren't getting great value for what they were paying for. However, by building Hover, it meant that we would have to move hundreds of thousands of people to the new system. You can imagine how many questions we've had to answer in the past three months, simply as a result of putting people on this new system (new policies, pricing, etc. all have a way of drawing out the questions). We're now answering all tickets within 2 days, and will be back to our goal of 1 business day by the end of this week. So yeah, customer service has been slow while we've worked through this transition, but we're coming out the other side as I write this.

@Noel - We've received your multiple inquiries and someone has been assigned to your case. This should already be sorted out as I write this, but it underscores the importance of keeping the contact information for your domain up to date at all times. Domain names are important assets and I encourage all of our customers to ensure that they have a responsible process in place for managing these assets. In this case, had your contact information on your account been up to date, you could have avoided the hassle of having to prove your ownership of this name, etc.

@Pat - we had to standardize our pricing for three different services with the move to Hover. NetIdentity customers would have seen a $5 increase over what they were paying last year. However, you should also note that when we took over NetIdentity, an IMAP capable account would have cost you more than $50 per year. That same account is now just $35/year and also includes the ability to point your surname domain name at any website, blog, etc. that you wish (for no extra charge), a service that would have previously cost you an additional $100 per year, or more in some cases. Overall, the new simplified pricing structure puts most of our customers out ahead of where they would have been at with the prior pricing. We tried to be as fair as possible when we made these adjustments. As far as your IMAP reliability goes, I'd encourage you to continue to work with our customer service team - we are not experiencing any intermittent IMAP issues, in fact, the independent service monitoring system we use, Pingdom, reports better than 99% availability going back to July of last year when we started tracking this sort of thing - and that includes scheduled maintenance downtime! You can see the complete network status history at http://about.hover.com/networkstatus - it sounds to me that there may be connectivity issues between your IMAP client and our servers that we can work together to resolve.

@RAF - as part of consolidating the services, we had to make some tough decisions about what packages received which features. We've basically discontinued offering pure email forwarding. Originally back in 1996 when we first started offering email forwarding, it was a fairly cheap service to provide - so we could essentially give it away. However, as the spam problem grew out of control, it has come to mean that providing an email forward costs us almost exactly the same as providing a full mailbox - the only material difference is a few cents per month that goes to cover the cost of storing mail while we wait for you to download it. Most of the costs associated with mail come from bandwidth used to carry spam, computer horsepower used to filter spam, etc. Internally, arguments have been raised that the additional transit costs of forwarding the mail to a third provider may actually exceed the costs of storing it locally, although I'm not sure 100% that this is true. So, we've discontinued offering pure forwarding and only sell full mailboxes now. Along with each mailbox, you've got the choice to forward that mail, but gone is the option to get 100 mail forwards for a couple of bucks and use that to forward to another service.

Stop being so patronizing Ross - you have been arranging the deck chairs on your "Titanic" for a long time and nothing has changed at Hover. If it had, people wouldn't still be writing these flaming bags on your site as well as places like this. I gave you jokers 6 months to provide consistent email support post-Hover and got nothing but BS from everyone with the exception of the person that helped sort out the MX record transfer - he was good.

Now get back to your full scale denial.

Hmm. I guess we'll have to disagree Doug. I would point out that we haven't been live for six months at this point, so I'm not clear on what you are referring to. I can also very clearly see in our help desk that the oldest unanswered ticket in our primary queue was submitted at 11:53 yesterday morning - and is a followup to an earlier question posed by one of our customer service advisors - definitely within the time frames that we have committed to sticking to.

I'm sorry that you got a bad shake during the transition, but denial and rearranging deck chairs don't end up helping our clients - my team does and we're very clearly meeting the demands of our customers after a brief spell of problems after three months of migrations (don't forget that we moved IYD in December, Domain Direct in January and NetIdentity thereafter - this wasn't one clean shot, it was several months of concerted effort)

In any event, it sounds like you've already taken your business elsewhere - I'm sorry about that, and I do hope that your new provider manages to meet your expectations.

/ro

Doug - not sure where the anger comes from, but my original post came as a response to several other customers with questions as well. As much as it might seem that I'm here to make your life difficult, I really just wanted to drop in with some help and advice for a number of customers, not just yourself.

I remember when Google first hit the scene. Their interface was simple and easy to use. Hover's service reminds me of this. I think Hover should fly.

I was using domaindirect services and it was switched to Hover. I got no notification of the switch or changes. I am unable to log into the site with my old credentials and have been waiting 4 days to have my issue acknowledged. If this is the level of customer support I should expect, I am moving my domains away ASAP...thats if they ever get back to me.