Not interested in the back story? Click here to go straight to how I moved my domains away from WebTextMedia to dotPh.

There are a bunch of .ph (Philippine TLD) domains that I’ve been managing for several years now. Through the years since 2012, every time I needed a new .ph domain, I’d go to WebTextMedia and register there.

I only ever registered domains with WebTextMedia. Long before I came across this company, I already had a few VPS and hosting services from providers I was – and continue to be – happy with. These domains were all pointed to Cloudflare which in turn was set up to point to each domain’s respective web servers.

From the time that I began setting up domains with WebTextMedia, the renewal process has always been… odd… to say the least.

When you’re in the Client Area, there’s a setting for each domain to turn auto-renewal on. There’s also a button that says “Renew Now” for expired domains.

Neither of these renewal facilities ever worked for me. Setting up auto-renewal did nothing, I would still get invoiced for the domain, with them failing to charge the payment method I had set up.

In a number of cases, I missed the deadline for renewing a domain, which was when the “Renew Now” button appeared next to the domain. Clicking on it, though, led to a 404 error page.

So always, whether the domain was expired or not, I needed to open a ticket and very kindly ask them to please renew my domain, making sure to attach a screenshot or scan of my payment (a deposit to their Savings Account with Metrobank or Banco de Oro).

I also always found myself asking them to please keep the domain pointed to the right nameservers. It seems they lost the record when the domain expired, and won’t know to set them back up again after renewal. And no, there isn’t a way to set that up myself. The button to edit nameservers also led to an error.

In January of 2019, a domain of mine was nearing expiration. As per usual, I went to create a new ticket to ask WebTextMedia to renew the domain. This time was different, however. Two days after creating the ticket, it got auto-closed due to inactivity. I just got this frustrating canned response saying they haven’t heard back from me so they were closing the ticket. That same day, I added a reply to reopen the ticket.

Two days later, guess what? Yep, it got auto closed again.

This went on for weeks. While this was going on, the domain had expired. In the middle of doing battle with this silent ticket, another domain neared its expiration so I had to create another ticket. And this other ticket was just as silent as the first.

When this second domain expired without a peep from WebTextMedia was when I started feeling desperate. I was looking for their phone numbers without success. They did not seem to have social media accounts anymore, or I could not find them. I did find this Facebook Group, “PhilHosting is also Webtextmedia Group“, where posts complained about terrible experiences with WebTextMedia.

I messaged the page to explain what I was going through and asked if they had heard of solutions others tried that might work for me. The person behind the page was not surprised at hearing about my predicament, but sadly had no solid suggestions for fixing the situation.

This was when I looked at dotPH. They claimed to be the “official domain name registry of the Philippines.” Under normal circumstances, I would have given this claim very little weight. This situation was far from normal, though. I found the notion of asking for this company’s help very promising indeed.

Here is what I did to get this fixed

I created an account with dotPH using the same email address I used in registering my domains. It later turned out that this was critically important.

I took screenshots of the domains I had in WebTextMedia’s client area, as well as the pending tickets.

Using the account I created, I initiated a chat from the dotPH homepage. There, I sent a message explaining my situation in detail with my screenshots attached. I explained that I needed help regaining control over my domains, making sure I expressed the urgency of the problem. I asked them if they could help me get Transfer Authorization codes so I could pull my domains out of WebTextMedia and set them up under dotPH.

In about 20 hours, I got a reply saying that they’re reaching out to WebTextMedia and that they’ll let me know how their efforts pan out.

I replied with a thank you, further saying that I looked forward to hearing back from them.

After another 10 hours or so, I began receiving Emails from dotPH support containing auth codes for my domains. Hurray!

I wasted no time in setting up the domains in dotPH’s control panel. It allowed me to move active domains without a fee and allowed me to pay with a debit card for those that needed renewing.

With that done, I was able to set up nameservers for my domains. And just like that, the problem was solved!

I asked dotPH of I can recommend the solution path I took, and they said yes. They did ask that when reaching out to them, one needs to use the same email address that’s the contact info email. This helps dotPH verify your ownership of the domain. If you’re not sure what Email to use, their WHOIS lookup tool should bring it up.

If you no longer have access to this email address, you may be asked to verify domain ownership another way. You will need to arrange this with dotPH yourself. dotPH is also quick to point out that there are cases when other factors might affect the speed or possibility of generating auth codes for your domains.

I hope this helps!