Setup Problems with Network Solutions Advanced DNS Service

[Richard Kaplan]

I have two domains, www.flyimc.com and www.umrpc.com, which have been hosted
for a couple years by www.hypermart.net without any problems.

This past summer Hypermart was sold and the successor owners have been very
unreliable at maintaining the web and email hosting services.

I read about Network Solution's Advanced DNS service and it seemed this
would be a good way to transition to a new web/email host without having
downtime.  I called Network Solutions and was told that indeed this
conversion could be done seemlessly.  And their website says there is 24/7
technical service support for Network Solutions.

Well, I did the changeover Friday (10/31) and it has been awful.  Now when I
send email to any address at umrpc.com I get a "Relay Denied" message from
the Network Solutions DNS server.  Yet when I do an NSLOOKUP I find that
neither of my domains has yet been transferred to the Network Solutions DNS
server, even though a WHOIS shows my correct request.  It appears that the
change to the Network Solutions DNS has partially propagated to the system,
but the Network Solutions DNS server itself has not yet been updated.  So
the mail is going to the new DNS server but then it is being rejected.

To add insult to injury, it turns out there is NO WEEKEND TECHNICAL SERVICE
for the Network Solutions Advanced DNS service.  This seems incredible to me
since I would think that people subscribing to such a service would be just
the people running businesses which want no downtime on their Internet
service.

So I have several questions:

(1) Was there  a way I could have switched to the Network Solutions Advanced
DNS service without downtime on my web and email hosting service?

(2) Is there any way I can temporarily fix this to go back to my old
email/web hosts?

(3) Has anyone else experienced such awful customer service from Hypermart
and/or Network Solutions?

(4) How long can I realisticallly expect until the domain propagation
through the network is complete so I am up and running on the new service?

-- 
Richard Kaplan
rkaplan at flyimc.com
www.flyimc.com