My domain is currently registered thru Hostdepartment. They are not responding to phone/email and the control panel is down (about 2 weeks now!!). My question is this: how do I change my nameservers - is there another way to do this without going thru Hostdepartment?
It's up to who the controlling registrar is for your domain name. You will need to call them and ask them to update the name servers. If you have an account with us, you tell them to update the name servers to... ns1.Winhost.com ns2.Winhost.com ns3.Winhost.com Remember you always have the right to change to another registrar. We ourselves are not a registrar so we can't do registrar transfers but you may want to look at registrars such as Networksolutions.com.
That bites. Do a whois lookup on your domain and see who the domain registrar is. I'm pretty sure your host is a reseller for domains.
Unfortunately you aren't the only one having problems with Hostdepartment. The Web Hosting Talk forums are full of complaints about them. And you know things are bad when your competitors are advertising on your name with "server down" ads:
I don't see why not. I can only assume that you are current with your balance with your hosting provider, and if you are you should be able to contact your registrar and tell them that you are looking to perform a registrar transfer. You'll probably need to look at some registrars and register an account with them. All have different steps to request a registrar transfer but they should give you in detail just exactly what you need to do.
