NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael B Allen]

Hi All,

I have a problem. I cannot get the ISP I registered my domains with to
reply to my support requests. Initially they did respond to my request
and said they would look into the issue. However, I did not receive
any response since. I have sent numerous emails to them in the past
week and a half and tried sending new fresh ones without their ticket
number so that I received their automated acknowledgment with a new
ticket number (which I did receive so I know I'm not just getting
filtered). But still I have not heard from them at all. If I call
their hosting support group I get run around for 3 minutes before the
robotic woman invariably says "we are unable to take your call right
now" and hangs up.

So I'm looking for opinions about ISPs that handle domain
registration, domain management (basically DNS zone record updating)
and some hosting (with PHP of course) and how to transfer those
domains. I actually host my important stuff myself on a virtual
private server so I am primarily interested in domain registration and
management. The current ISP has very crude utilities for managing the
domains, changing DNS and so on. It can be a chore just to login and
operate their "control panel".

Can anyone recommend an ISP that has the following:

 * good responsive support
 * good, easy to use utility for managing domains, registering new
ones, adjusting DNS zone info, etc
 * affordable domain registration
 * affordable hosting with PHP
 * free hosting for small static sites

Has anyone had any experience with transferring domains from one
company to another? I assume I just get DNS setup with the new ISP as
far as I can and then get the old ISP to transfer the domains to the
new ISP. But considing I have had zero contact with the soon-to-be-old
ISP, I'm wondering how I can actually get this done. It's not like I
can just tell my credit card company to stop all payments - they
control my domains.

Also, if I paid for a domain for say 10 years, do I have to pay full
price all over again?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
PHP Active Directory Integration
http://www.ioplex.com/plexcel.html