Comment by sholladay

Hi Lee. I appreciate the offer but the simple answer is that Vercel abruptly pivoted away from backend oriented services. That broke everything I built on the Now v1 platform and there wasn't anything to do but switch to other providers. It was stated that migration to Now v2 would be simple but that never materialized in time for the Now v1 shut down. On top of that, I encountered a lot of bugs with the deployment system when the new infrastructure started coming online, where it would auto deploy to data centers that couldn't run Now v1 apps and then the CLI would crash. I tried to be understanding, given you were a startup in a competitive space. It was unfortunate but I decided to at least continue using your domains and DNS features. But then the format of the zeit.world nameservers changed a couple of times and again with relatively short notice. Other frustrations... the domain search & buy page used to be public, now it requires a login for seemingly no reason (trying to keep bots out?). The marketing of early Zeit was all about embracing open standards and now Vercel is basically the exact opposite, with proprietary solutions for running frontend projects being at the heart of the product. I can only guess as to why it unfolded that way, but the transition was extremely rough for people who bought into the original vision. I just logged in now to transfer out some domains I still have in there and discovered that years later you still don't have a way for customers to change their domain's nameservers other than contacting support. That's just user hostile. A lot of people would say that is a dark pattern. I've literally never encountered another registrar that didn't have a simple button to change my domain's nameservers. Having to contact support to do this was excusable when your company was only a year old, but at this point it looks negligent, if not deliberate.

If you want more details, my contact info is here: https://seth-holladay.com/contact