Regfly Sucks

Regfly sucks! Do not use regfly.com!

I inherited an SSL certificate that had been registered with regfly. It had come up for renewal, so I thought I'd renew it with the same company. Their prices were cheap, after all!

I submitted the order and my credit card was charged, but I was unable to proceed further due to an error about insufficient credit. This seemed odd. I raised a support ticket and tried again many times. As the expiry of an SSL certificate causes much consternation for users and because I hadn't received a response, I purchased another account credit, hoping that this would fix it. It did not. Worse still, their system mysteriously charged me a third time and didn't credit this to my account.

It took a total of about four months to sort this out. Luckily I was able to acquire short-term trial certificates from more reputable companies in the meantime while I battled it out with the support people, who:

Would reply to my tickets and close them, which made it impossible to reply to them. It was necessary to create a new ticket, adding in all the relevant information from the previous tickets each time in case the support people were too lazy to look it up.
Would reply to my tickets with "the problem has been fixed, try again" and close them, even though the problem had not been fixed.
Revamped their Web site, deleting all old correspondence. I had to open a new ticket, but fortunately the new system didn't allow them to close tickets straight away.
I eventually somehow managed to convince them to look into the issue and someone managed to generate the certificate, finally.
They reported that no record of the third CC charge existed on their system. I had to scan and email them a copy of my credit card statement. The credit was applied.
Since I had $20 in credit, I thought that I would try to renew another SSL certificate there. I should have known better - it failed with exactly the same error, about eight months on! I opened a support ticket and have received no reply within six days.
Since I still had $10 in credit after doing that, I thought I'd try to register a domain name with them. Sure, SSL is difficult to do, but surely a domain registrar must be good at registering domains. The credit was happily taken and the order went into 'awaiting execution' state, where it has remained for the last two days.

I've since registered the SSL certificate with Namecheap, whom I could not recommend more highly based on my experiences here. Their SSL process was completely automated and I had a working certificate within ten minutes, and it didn't require a CA bundle or anything fiddly like that. I can't comment on their support since I didn't need to deal with them.

I decided that it was better to cut my losses and actually get the things registered rather than waste hours of non-billable time battling it out with a bunch of shysters. It now looks like they've shut the site down. Good riddance! This page may serve as a warning to other people if they rise from the ashes yet again.

Speaking of which, are there any Australian domain name registrars who have live, fully automated registration? I currently use Intaserve and while their prices are great, registration and renewal appears to be completely manual and inevitably takes days and it's much more reliable to phone them up if trying to renew a domain name on the expiry day. They don't seem to have updated their systems in a few years. How hard is it to buy a decent, working, automated domain name registration system from someone? It's your core business, guys. To be fair, they do seem to be better than they used to be. I'm trialling OzHosting.com at the moment, but their prices have mysteriously gone up and are no longer cheaper than Intaserve's.