Avoid eNom - seriously

[gei]

Is anyone still using eNom? How are people dealing with their constant price increases? They have become as unreliable a partner as cPanel.

We got yet another email last night about price increases - unfortunately we still have a ton of domains with them and are kind of stuck. Does anyone have advice on how to transfer out en masse? ie some strategy for transferring out on renewal?

Now in addition to the annual spend requirements, they have minimum registration requirements - ie you have to spend $x per year AND register x new domains to maintain your status. We have moved all our new registrations to Hexonet a few years ago because their prices are WAY better, so we register 0 new domains with eNom.

I'm trying to rid ourselves of partners I consider unreliable like cPanel and eNom to not have to dread every email that comes from them and just waiting for the next price increase.

As an aside, I highly recommend everyone reach out to Hexonet - their prices are dramatically better than even eNom's "Platinum Plus" tier, and they are very flexible. Support has been excellent (they reply in minutes, vs weeks from eNom), and their WHMCS integration is also much better.

[Kian]

I think you can transfer all domains in this way:

1. Open example.com in WHMCS admin
2. Change Registrar from eNom to Hexonet and save
3. Press Transfer and wait

The only problem is that in order to migrate all domains from eNom to Hexonet you still need the approval of Registrants (your customers) 😪

[gei]

Are there transfer verification emails sent out by eNom? Is there any way to disable these and just have the transfers processed automatically?

We would notify our clients and let them know, and then we could just disable the enom "renew" function and transfer them all manually as they come up for renewal...

[brian!]

2 minutes ago, gei said:

Are there transfer verification emails sent out by eNom? Is there any way to disable these and just have the transfers processed automatically?

usually, it's the receiving registrar that sends the email to the registrant, so this might be a question to ask Hexonet... and will also depend on the TLD as there might be some that won't need such authorisation.

15 minutes ago, gei said:

We would notify our clients and let them know, and then we could just disable the enom "renew" function and transfer them all manually as they come up for renewal...

it might be worth going through each applicable TLD and checking that a) an additional year is added on transfer (often not with ccTLDs) and/or b) any cost involved... if the answer to both was no, then you could move those earlier.

2 hours ago, gei said:

Now in addition to the annual spend requirements, they have minimum registration requirements - ie you have to spend $x per year AND register x new domains to maintain your status.

I wouldn't normally suggest this, but it might be worth finding out if those conditions apply to the free eNom account with WHMCS... though I don't know if you'd be able to have two accounts with eNom in this way and do an internal transfer between resellers... and it would effectively make you a subreseller for WHMCS. 😱

[gei]

1 hour ago, brian! said:

I wouldn't normally suggest this, but it might be worth finding out if those conditions apply to the free eNom account with WHMCS... though I don't know if you'd be able to have two accounts with eNom in this way and do an internal transfer between resellers... and it would effectively make you a subreseller for WHMCS. 😱

Yes you can do an internal push. Ironically we originally pushed our domains OUT of our WHMCS sub-reseller account so we could get their platinum status. Now with their new requirements it does in fact make sense to push them back.

[Kian]

1 hour ago, brian! said:

it might be worth going through each applicable TLD and checking that a) an additional year is added on transfer (often not with ccTLDs) and/or b) any cost involved... if the answer to both was no, then you could move those earlier.

This!

I suggest you to prepare a query (or page) that runs on a daily basis to select all domains that are expiring soon. This way you can initiate transfer without wasting money. As you can imagine the process will take one year to complete 😑

[DennisHermannsen]

Hi,

We made the same decision, although we wanted to move from Ascio to Hexonet. I built a script that runs on the PreRegistrarRenewDomain hook for domains where 'registrar' was equal to 'ascio'.
The script aborts the renew, gets the EPP code through Ascios API and initiate a transfers through Hexonets API. If successful, it changes the registrar in WHMCS.

To make sure everything goes correctly, admins will receive an email about whether initiating the transfer failed or succeeded. Some domains aren't renewed during transfer - if this is the case, the email message will tell about it. If a domain has a registration period of more than 1 year, it's also stated in the email. These last two scenarios require manual intervention. It took about a week to get sorted, but holy hell has it saved us a lot of time. Since November, we've moved around 800 domains. You could do it the same way 🙂

6 hours ago, Kian said:

The only problem is that in order to migrate all domains from eNom to Hexonet you still need the approval of Registrants (your customers) 😪

For most domains, the transfer will be ACK'ed after 5 days if no action is taken by the registrant. To avoid that our customers did this, I used the SendEmail API in the hook to tell the customer what was going on. So far, we haven't had a customer deny the transfer - but it could very well happen, and there's nothing more we can do about it. Also, just changing registrar and initiating a transfer isn't the best option as transfers costs the same price as renewal for a lot of TLDs 😛 And after typing this, I read your last comment and realized you already knew this. 😄

 

[gei]

Great idea Dennis!

[Grizzlyware Josh]

If you need any help sorting that out @gei, please let me know - I've done that for two large hosts now, one of them from any other registrar (which allows for consolidating varied portfolios) --> to the new one. Happy to answer any questions.

[Ron the Web Guy]

Great!  😞

I have been working day & night to move nearly 50 domains from GoDaddy to enom via WHMCS.

If enom is horrible why does WHMCS promote them?

I am doing all this just so I don't have to use GoDaddy anymore. Are there better options than enom?

[gei]

Because WHMCS gets a hefty commission when you sign up for an eNom reseller through their link. You effectively become a sub-reseller of WHMCS.

I have found Hexonet to be 100x better. They will match or beat any prices from eNom and their WHMCS module is updated very often. Their support is also much better.

They also let you refill with credit card with no additional fees, whereas eNom charges some insane 5% which you have to tack on to all your prices.

[Ron the Web Guy]

On 5/5/2020 at 4:25 PM, gei said:

Because WHMCS gets a hefty commission when you sign up for an eNom reseller through their link. You effectively become a sub-reseller of WHMCS.

I have found Hexonet to be 100x better. They will match or beat any prices from eNom and their WHMCS module is updated very often. Their support is also much better.

They also let you refill with credit card with no additional fees, whereas eNom charges some insane 5% which you have to tack on to all your prices.

Thanks for the info gei.

I checked out Hexonet and even officially signed up for a reseller account but I couldn't figure  it out. 😞

I am not saying that enom is better but Hexonet has a red banner notice dated Oct 2019 as the 1st thing I see when going into their dashboard. To me that says: "we haven't updated our dashboard in over 8 months"

I also found their domain pricing to be much higher than GoDaddy and enom: https://www.hexonet.net/prices

[Ron the Web Guy]

Update: I contacted HEXONET and like you said gei they matched/beat eNom and so far their support has been stellar. I am just starting out with HEXONET so fingers crossed.

[gei]

Glad to hear it. Yeah I reached out to a bunch of resellers and chose hexonet based on their responsive and their prices. They have been great so far - a million times better than enom for sure.

[PapaKai]

Just in case someone has trouble with getting started with HEXONET. Use this guide as entry point please. If there are further related questions, always feel free to open a support ticket.

[pjs32]

On 3/3/2020 at 11:23 PM, DennisHermannsen said:

Hi,

We made the same decision, although we wanted to move from Ascio to Hexonet. I built a script that runs on the PreRegistrarRenewDomain hook for domains where 'registrar' was equal to 'ascio'.
The script aborts the renew, gets the EPP code through Ascios API and initiate a transfers through Hexonets API. If successful, it changes the registrar in WHMCS.

To make sure everything goes correctly, admins will receive an email about whether initiating the transfer failed or succeeded. Some domains aren't renewed during transfer - if this is the case, the email message will tell about it. If a domain has a registration period of more than 1 year, it's also stated in the email. These last two scenarios require manual intervention. It took about a week to get sorted, but holy hell has it saved us a lot of time. Since November, we've moved around 800 domains. You could do it the same way 🙂

For most domains, the transfer will be ACK'ed after 5 days if no action is taken by the registrant. To avoid that our customers did this, I used the SendEmail API in the hook to tell the customer what was going on. So far, we haven't had a customer deny the transfer - but it could very well happen, and there's nothing more we can do about it. Also, just changing registrar and initiating a transfer isn't the best option as transfers costs the same price as renewal for a lot of TLDs 😛 And after typing this, I read your last comment and realized you already knew this. 😄

 

Hi Dennis,

Any chance you could share your script?!  as that is exactly what we are looking for.

[DennisHermannsen]

@pjs32 Hexonet has bought the code. Contact their support and ask to talk to Kai 🙂