Having run a personal business for over thirty years, it’s mildly frustrating, to say the least, when personal clients we’ve known for decades go over our heads to contact distant third parties to have them carry out actions related to services we provide to them, our existing personal clients. The only third party we rely on for certain services is our primary domain registrar, away from whom we are slowly moving all of our domains (e.g., look up niner.net) because their services are so inadequate, unpredictable and frustrating.
The name of this company depends on how and where you come across their name, but it includes one or more of the following:
- RRPproxy
- Key-Systems Internet Solutions
- CentralNIC
- Team Internet
As well as about thirty other company names, because, like a lot of modern companies these days, the only way they have managed to “grow” is to get funding (“other people’s money”) to buy existing companies that are (or were) providing a good service, thereby multiplying the size of their original company. It’s “Company Growth 101” in the 21st century; gone are the days of organic growth by actually providing a good service that has grown because your existing clientele tell their friends what good service they get from the original company. Now those clients are subsumed by the now huger company, and what happens is that they tell their friends what crap the new company is, and there is an exodus … partly to one of the other thirty odd companies run by the same conglomerate because the fleeing customer doesn’t realise the connection.
The cause of this particular blog post and my frustration today, on a long weekend here, is that Key-Systems Internet Solutions (aka RRPproxy aka CentralNIC) has contacted us again, the second time in about as many weeks, to inform us that one of our very personal clients, who has my personal phone number, has made a request they would normally make through us. “Us” is Craig Hartnett, the same principle of NinerNet Communications Company as has existed since day one, 13 June 1996. Why did they do this, instead of picking up their phone and dialling or messaging me as they normally do? Good question, because if I knew I wouldn’t be making this blog post.
So the point of this post is to make clear that we’re still here, running what has become primarily a web hosting and domain registration company, and still renewing domains as they come up for renewal, which we usually do on or around the first of the month. Thank-you for using the existing contact information you have, probably buried in your email and/or phone, rather than seeking out third parties, who will threaten us unnecessarily, and set arbitrary deadlines for us to meet, so far ranging from 48 hours — again, on a long weekend — to five days, because they have no standing rules (please see my earlier “unpredictable” comment) on how this should be carried out.
