Do you know who handles your domain name registration? Beware

Do you know who manages your domain name registration? You best be careful or you could get screwed around big time! Some advice.. recently I had a really bad experience with a company that handles some of my domain name registrations (luckily its only my personal and secondary stuff.. not all the important ones!!) I renewed 3 domain names and paid the annual fee via credit card, no problemo. Then, low-and-behold, about 2 weeks later the updates hadn't taken effect. Naturally I'm getting weirded out thinking that I may lose the rights to the domains. So I start contacting the company via the contact form, tech support etc... I do this over and over again and get nothing back, no feedback, nada. So now I'm getting really weirded out and move a couple of the more important domains over to godaddy... luckily the move takes effect. So, I continue to try to get in touch with them to no avail. Naturally, I decide to do the smart thing and I totally flip out on their tech support via email.... really, it was a masterpiece! Their reaction... they yank the freaking plug on all my domains.. yes that's right.. now none of them are accessible, and get this, they have locked them up so that I can't transfer any of them... NICE! NEedless to say that I'm pretty much prepared to rip someone's head off. I'm still battling with them and hearing nothing, thankfully I have a friend who does webhosting for me and also handles domain reg. so he's slowly having luck getting the names moved but its a real pain. So, let this be a lesson.. use only reputable firms (tucows, godaddy etc...) and NEVER ever use jumpdomain.com - lesson learned! Obviously I'd love to go legal on these guys but it really isn't a feesible option