I am a customer of fatcow and I'd say their services are the best. Like for example.. my account. I have about 8 different websites on one account. Which I can have an unlimited amount of websites with no extra fee. I have unlimited diskspace.. unlimited bandwidth.. email forms/forums/blogs/guestbooks/galleries installs through the control panel and a shopping cart to build your store and web site builders and 24/7 support if you ever have any questions or issues. The only pitfall to using fatcow is their domain names are $20 a year.. but that's why I register my domains names through Ipower.com for $9.95 a year and then change the nameservers over to fatcow
As for you guys who lost your domain name.. that is your own fault. Simply sending them an email saying "transfer my domain" and then leaving it at that for them to do all the work is not the way to go. You need to do some work and followup on it.. it's not their fault if you don't renew it and get it transferred. You should also have renewed your domain before transferring it. If anything it would be the fault of the registrar you are transferring to for not informing you on the rules and regulations and how to do a registrar transfer to them.
ICANN, the organization responsible for the stability of the Internet requires that you:
1. Domain name cannot be expired or expiring within 10 days.
2. Domain name has been registered with your current registrar for at least 60 days.
3. Make sure you have access to the administrative email.
4. Make sure the domain is unlocked.
5. Make sure you get the authorization code from your current registration provider.
This does not apply for fatcow only.. this applies for ALL domains. And you would initiate the transfer by contacting the registrar you are transferring to and THEY would initiate the transfer and would contact your current registrar asking to take the domain.. your current registrar then sends an email to the administrative email address on the domain asking for the authorization code. After providing the authorization code the domain will then be transferred.
So just so you know fatcow is not a registrar. Fatcow is a web hosting company who resells domains for tucows. Yes I agree it's pretty crappy what tucows did to you.. but their aloud to do that because you let your domain expire and delete.. they have the ability to do this when your domain is in the deletion status which means they are in the process of deleting it and making it available to the public. They steal domains sometimes if they think they are valuable.. for example.. say google.com expired and was about to be made available to the public and you're the registrar who is about to delete it.. are you going to make it available to the public again for someone to register for a few bucks?? or keep it because it could be worth something.. well.... google would probably be worth (m/b)illions lol By the way it takes a month or two before you domain enters the deletion period so you had all the time in the world to renew it so it's not fatcows problem/fault.
Sorry for the rant
all in all, fatcow is a superb host in my opinion and they have hundreds of thousands of customers so they must think so too... i'm just trying to state that you shouldn't be dissing them when it's not their fault
don't be hatin
later