Domain name chaos

As you may have experienced, my initial domain name, buzz-honey.com has been up and down and generally all screwed up.  I registered the domain with yahoo in 2005 and had been chugging along with them just paying $8.95 per year to keep the site/name active.  This year, I noticed that they planned to raise the rate to $34.95 per year.  I decided to transfer my registration to another service which is supposed to be an easy process.  I signed up with namecheap.com to transfer my domain and crossed my fingers.  I had to get the transfer password from yahoo so I called them and asked what to do.  They said I needed to cancel my service with yahoo in order for the transfer to take place.  I argued with the technician thinking that it can’t be a good thing to cancel with them.  He assured me that it was the only way to make the transfer happen and that my site would continue to exist as-is until the transfer.  Foolishly, I cancelled my yahoo account and within 2 hours, buzz-honey was down.  Only slightly irritated, I called yahoo back and asked them what happened.  The next technician said that cancelling the yahoo account made them drop the domain and move it to melbourne-it, the company in Australia that they use to register domains.  I gave this technician the name of the first technician and asked him to inform/reprimand him.  Anyhow, I then began the chore of contacting melbourne-it.  Not wanting to make an international phone call, I foolishly decided to send them an email…and then another…and then another.  I got no response until 3 days later.  Even then, the response was a canned blurb.  I was pretty irritated by this point so I purchased the new domain name for this blog from namecheap.com hoping to get something back up and running.  Nameheap did a great job, was quick to respond, had online chat support, etc.  I definitely recommend them.  Anyhow, 6 days passed between domain transfer initiation to  completetion.  Apparently that is not too bad as I have read stories of transfers taking much longer.  Still, it is unacceptable for a domain name transfer to be this much of a problem.  Take heed!