The perils of Freenom

I’ve just spent the best part of 3 months trying to move off Freenom domain registrar, to another registrar for my .tk domain. I was looking for a registrar with better security, as something as simple as 2FA would improve my domains security no end. There aren’t too many domain registrars that support .tk domains, but I finally settled on using InternetBS and their prices were cheaper and they had 2FA.

So I started the process as you normally would a normal domain transfer, but after entering the EPP auth code from Freenom, the transfer failed every time I retried it. So I opened a ticket with InternetBS, who said they couldn’t see my .tk domain in the correct .tk TLD database and Freenom need to fix this. So I opened a ticket with Freenom support via my account support page. I waited 2 months, before I decided enough was enough, so I started to ring their number found at the bottom of the webpage. I ran 7 times over the course of 3 weeks, no one would help me and would just say either the system is down or they’ll get the tech support to ring me back. No one ever rang me back, so I decided what else can I do, they clearly don’t care enough to answer my support ticket or even acknowledge my ticket.

I wouldn’t normally do this, but when its coming up to 3 months without a reply and the phone support was also very lacking in trying to help me. I decided I would email every single email address for @freenom.com I could find on their website and anywhere else I could find one.

Few days later finally! Someone replies and says “I’ll get this chased internally as they should of replied by now”. I get an update in my ticket few hours later, saying I need to contact [email protected], to assist with the transfer.

After a few emails going back and forth, the outcome was. We needed to arrange a time that both myself and the person from freedom was available. This was 1PM UK time, at this time he would cancel my domain with Freenom, so I could then registrar it as a new domain with InternetBS. The domain was cancelled at exactly 1PM and I registered it a minute later at 1:01PM. Once the domain had been registered on InternetBS, they would add the remaindering days I previously had to the new expiry date, since they own the TLD.

Note: They were often very slow at replying to these emails sometimes 2-3 days apart.

Unfortunately its now reset my domain registration date of my domain, but that’s not really the end of the world. They also confirmed in the email exchange I had with them, that the EPP transfer code doesn’t work for .tk domains, so no idea why its even there, its very misleading.

So to anyone reading this, I highly recommend you move off Freenom if you can. Hopefully you’ll now know how to move off Freenom, and to start the process by emailing [email protected]. I’m so glad I’ve moved now after this very bad experience with their support staff and telephone service desk.