Tag: domain names

Domain Registry of America is not your friend

Before the Internet, it was necessary for businesses to have an ad in the Yellow Pages so customers could find them. Some unscrupulous businesses found that if they sent an invoice to random businesses that looked like a Yellow Pages bill, a few businesses would pay the bill just to make sure they didn’t lose their Yellow Pages ad.

Fast forward to today, when everyone has to have a domain name. Unfortunately, these companies are still at it – you may have gotten a domain name renewal invoice from a number of companies including Domain Registry of America and Liberty Names. These companies send you an invoice for your domain name in the hopes that you’ll be concerned you are in danger of losing your name so you’ll go ahead and pay the invoice regardless.

Sometimes the invoice is actually for search engine promotion (which means they’ll post your web site on hundreds of ad-riddled pages if they do anything at all), but in the case of the Domain Registry of America, they will attempt to transfer the name to their registry, so you will be forced to renew your name through them in the future. Even worse is that if you decide to transfer (back) away from them, they will charge you an extra fee (sometimes up to $150) for the ability to transfer away from them.

D.R.O.A.’s bad business practices were even noted by Canadian courts as being Misleading

Bottom line – if you get anything in the mail for your domain name, feel free to contact It Won’t Byte and i’ll be happy to go over it with you and let you know if its the real deal or not. I’d rather get a phone call or email from you with a question then have you lose control of any part of your internet presence.

Network Solutions “Protects” Name Registrants

Netsol ProtectionOk, I offer domain name registration as part of my suite of services, but I just want to make sure people are aware of all the consequences of doing domain name searches with Network Solutions…

I think that Network Solution is back to its old tricks again. For the last year, there was a loophole in the domain name registration rules that allowed unscrupulous folks to reserve a name without paying for it for 5 days, set up an advertising portal on that name to see if it was worth buying, and if it was had some traffic to it, they would use a series of shell companies to continually re-renew a name (for free) every 5 days and not let anyone else buy it. Thankfully, this practice was ended recently, but just in time for it to be fresh in everyone’s mind, NetSol started a new practice billed as a “Protection Measure“.

Basically if you look up the availability of a name using NetSol’s name-lookup function, they lock up the name for you ‘for your protection’.  BUT, they only lock it up so that no other registrar can reserve it – not so that no other customer can reserve it.  In other words, let’s say you have a great idea and use Network Solutions to see if “XYZABCNet.com” is available, but you’re not sure you want to grab it right now, so you let NetSol ‘lock’ the name for 5 days.  The problem is, they have no problem with anyone else coming along and reserving that name, just as long as they don’t use another registrar to do it.  So anyone can come along and take your great domain name idea if you don’t register it right away. So you have two choices:

  1. Purchase the name right away for $35/year (plus numerous ‘add-ons’ like $9 private registration, etc.)
  2. Don’t get the name, and wait 5 days until NetSol releases their hold and then register it with another registrar (like It Won’t Byte, for $25/year + free DNS & private registration, ‘natch), and hope that in those 5 days, someone else doesn’t register it first…

I personally think that locking someone into doing business with you is not a way to build long-term business relationships, so I recommend against doing WHOIS/domain name searches with Network Solutions until they can start playing nicely again…