That’s right. I’ve found a whole new level of ridiculous. I won a domain at Namejet recently and was awarded the name in a previously unheard of registrar named SpeedNames. It happens fairly regularly at Namejet. They represent quite a large group of registrars selling their expired names. It’s what makes them great, and at the same time sucks when you have to deal with these small guys. Normally the first thing I do when I find out I’m at these small registrars is mark my calendar 60 days out so I immediately get it out and transferred to a registrar that isn’t going to rip me off. I say rip me off because most of them charge ridiculous renewal fees and other fees like DNS change fees, etc. But this is a first. This is the first time EVER I have seen a fee to correct my address or phone number.
I simply wanted to update my who is info on the domain to make it correct. Something that ICANN REQUIRES. When I went to change it they put it into a cart and wanted to charge me $19. Nineteen frickin dollars to put in the right phone numbers!!!. And they were going to charge me a VAT and I don’t even qualify for a VAT (I don’t think I do but I could be wrong) I had never really thought about rules for registrars but this HAS to be against some rule. If not, the fact that they can charge for anything they want shows the state of our industry. There has to be some form of oversee that makes certain domain managerial acts free. Especially a change of who is.
Unfortunately, they can do as they please (and pay the price of never doing business with them again.) Per ICANN, a registrar can also charge a fee to let you move the domain away.
Changing the subject, did you stack 2 Groupons yesterday? 😀
Acro,
Ha! I actually bought $500 worth today for $1400 plus. Deal of the Year. I’ve been renewing and transferring all day. Just like they wanted 🙂
I actually have something more ridiculous.
I just got billed £25 for that ‘free’ rumcake from Frank by fedex!
want the scoop? email me
How’d you buy $500 worth? They don’t allow you to change the quantity during checkout, it is grayed out at quantity 1.
As I wrote in my post the key is to only have one PER CITY. I have 20 different cities and it worked perfectly. All loaded into my account and I’ve been spending it all day.
how long we got to do this groupon thang I’ve been reading about?
“Per ICANN, a registrar can also charge a fee to let you move the domain away.”
That is very, very scary.
With the ownership change and recent orgy of in-transfer loss leaders, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Godaddy implement something like this, right after the coupon-code spigot gets shut off and everyone’s stuck paying Draconian retail rates.
Soon we will be charged for breathing. Don’t laugh – levels of ridiculousness and stupidity are rising at an unbelievable rate. It’s not easy to police many kinds of online activities. Competition on the internet is getting uglier by the second. There are so many “geniuses” who want to do the same thing. The “online genius vs online genius” scenario will have some pretty ludicrous consequences for the average online consumer who is not aware of what is going on.
Had the same thing with namejet auctions a couple years ago where a not so well known registrar tried to charge me $150 to renew a domain.
I just had the misfortune of dealing with this registrar via a NameJet win.
1.) I won the domain 10 days ago and was never assigned login info.
2.) When I was able to reset my password, it gave me access to the wrong account. Now when I login with my information I am given access to another person’s account with (3) domains in. That is a pretty big issue.
This issue is still going on.
I still don’t have access to manage the domain I won.
Brad
This seems to be a European thing. I was using EasySpace 12 years ago and they used to charge me for anything I wanted to do. Changing whois and nameservers was 2 of those things.
I still see people charging for DNS changes but that’s my first whois charge. It’s certainly not a large registrar thing
EasySpace’s business model was: cheap domains registration-renewal/expensive domain management.
They stopped doing this after they lost most of their customers after some customer outrage.
Who is charging for DNS changes?
Can’t remember exactly but Snap and Namejet have both thrown my name into some obscure registrar that charged for DNS changes. They new I was going to park it. I waited 60 days and moved it out. I measured the fee vs what I thought it would make in 60 days