This review was written in October 2004 and was posted in August 2006.

ICANN information

Registrar Name: Wooho T&C Co., Ltd. D/B/A RGNames.Com
Whois Server: whois.rgnames.com
Languages: Korean, English
Location: Seoul, Korea

RGNames appears to stand for "Register Global Names".

Unique features

While portions of the site have been translated from Korean to English, the error messages have not. If anything goes wrong, you encounter a message that is nearly impossible to read (for an English speaker).

IN spite of this problem, I am reviewing ONLY the English portion of this site.

RGNames does have a unique "Security Key" concept that sends an email to the admin email address when changes are made to the account and ONLY when a link is activated will the changes be actually be made to the database, instead of being "rolled back" later. While this could become problematic with massive changes, it does add another level of security if your account name and password become compromised.

There is a link to a "Beginner's Guide" on the English home page, but this links to a untranslated page that appears to explain the domain process. (I see domain extensions and IP addresses completely surrounded in "odd characters".)

Free parking or domain forwarding is also available, along with free single address email forwarding.

Support

Initially, RGNames sent out emails (completely in Korean) that probably told me about my new account -- I am guessing. I did see a series of characters that could have been the login name. Unfortunately, they forgot to add the dash that was part of the login name. The password was also not shown and not sent in another email.. Luckily the drop service I had purchased the domain from sent me an email that provided the correct login and password and that email was also in ENGLISH.

Account information

They do provide a very visible Login and Logout, which is lacking in many English sites. After login, it takes only a single click to see your first domain's name, options and expire date. Clicking on the domain name, I was greeted with a SINGLE screen that provided all the information about the domain -- lock status, creation date, along with each of the domain contact information. While this site does have language issues, the domain management portion of their site was STELLAR.

You can download a list of your domain names. It downloads with an XLS extension, but is really a strange HTML file. It displays only the domain status, payment method, creation date, expiration date, and owner name. There are also 2 Korean fields, a "Previous Day" field with the payment method in Korean. A nice concept, but not too useful.

The owner name is FIXED and cannot be changed, but they provide an area for mobile telephone number, in addition to the usual phone and fax number. While I'm not sure that I would want to post a mobile phone on a world-wide public database, they provide a option field for its entry. There is also and "Advertisement Phrase" field, which probably adds a line to their local Whois, but I did not verify this.

Email change process

You can only change the owner, administrator or name server on a single screen.

Changing the administrator allows you to change the admin, technical and financial contact. Making this change requires a security key. This security key is valid for one hour and is sent to your account email address (not the contact addresses for the domains). While I had received these keys in the past, I have not received any in nearly an hour and have requested 3 keys. In the past, they sent one email in Korean and a second in English.

Name Servers

They appear to support only 4 nameservers (although 13 are standard's maximum). If you attempt to change them, you will have to retype ALL of them AND include their IP addresses. You will also have to provide a security key as well.

Pricing

While there is a graphic area on the bottom left of each page that appears to show a link for pricing, but it is simply a graphic and no link is provided. I decided to examine the source HTML for the English home page and did find "pric" in a link. I then created the full URL from this link and a page, nearly all in Korean, appeared. Except for words ".com", ".met", ".org", etc. The page was unreadable to me. I saw the number 22,000 near a 1 (there was a 2 and a 5 as well), in the ".com" row. Assuming that this Korean site would be quoting in South Korean Won , I finally found a conversion site that could convert from this currency. It appeared that this might be over $19 for a registration, assuming NO currency conversion costs. When I attempted to renew the site, up to the point of supplying credit card information, the pricing showed "0 USD" for ANY amount of time.

Since there are plenty of larger ICANN registrars that provide English error messages for a lower cost, I decided to move. After finishing this review, I then began the transfer of my domain.

Renewal Notification

I received NO renewal messages at 15 days out and nearly ALL registrar and resellers send SOME notification at 15 days.

Transfers

So far, I have not tried this process, but I hope that it will go smoothly. Update: It finally went through.

Locking

While their site shows the domain as locked, the global whois shows the domain as "Active". Since I was going to perform the transfer, I did not experiment to see if their "unlocked icon" really mean "locked".

Pros

Sections of site remain untranslated to English

Conclusion

Namescout

Copyright © 2006 Rick Smith All rights reserved.