I live in England and have used a US owned UK domain registration service for a few years to register domain names (both .co.uk and .com). Since there prices seem very high I have decided not to use them any more and have waited for domain names to expire so that I can register them with someone else.
I should make it clear that whether this company and those who may be connected with it have acted illegally has not been proven but I would be interested in whether people think their practices are legal or fair.
Here are the facts:
1. Since this domain registration service seems so expensive compared with many others I decided not to renew my domain through them but wait for them to expire and then renew them through another service.
2. Although I have had problems with mail forwarding in the past their support department have never, ever responded to one of my emails about this. However, as the deadline for renewal of one of my .com addresses approached they made themselves very busy sending me constant reminders to stump up some more money or I might lose the domain name once it became de-registered.
"If a domain is not renewed by Friday, March 14, 2003 it will be deactivated by the registering authority shortly afterwards which means that the name will no longer be useable, and someone else will be able to register it."
"Domains will be deactivated from our system on the day after renewal is due if the renewal fee has not been paid."
Fine, I thought. As soon as it is deactivated I will register it through someone else.
3. A few days after the domain name expired I received an email stating the following:
"Unfortunately as you have not paid for the renewal for
your.com it has now been deleted from our database and nameservers, and is queued for delisting at the registry, which will mean that it will become available for re-registration on the open market sometime within the next few months.
Until the name is delisted at the central domain name registry it is not possible to re-register the name. If however you do still wish to keep this name, the only course of action open to you is to request that it be retreived by visiting
[[name...] removed].co.uk/retrieve.asp
There is a $205 (£135) fee payable for this service, which
includes manual retrieval, replacement of the domain name record and dns zone files and renewal of the domain name for a further year.
[name removed] Support Team"
3. It turns out that a different company registered the domain name for a year (I found this out by checking who now 'owned' the domain name ) surprise, surprise on the very same day that my ownership of it expired. They are not doing anything with it, if you type the domain name into a browser it is unresolved. I strongly suspect that these companies are connected and they have registered the domain name to prevent me from registering it through anyone else and so that they can extort £135 from me by lying to me about deregistering the domain name.
This practice seems anti-competitive and fraudulent (they appear to have told me one thing whilst doing another in an attempt to extort money from me).
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
common practice, nothing unlawful as far as I can see, and to be honest this is how most big registrars operate.
The fault is with yourself for NOT transferring the domain name to another registrar before renewal.
as for the name being re-registered, there is a whole business model based on this where companies will register deleted/dropped domains and then either do the following:
1, sell, rent back to you.
2, point the domain to a porn site.
3, point the domain name to a PPC engine and share a % of revenue generated.
you were obviously quite aware of how kind this company was, and should have made plans beforehand.
sorry to sound rude, but you really only got yourself to blame.
Shak
However, they still appear to have knowingly lied to me in correspondence asking for money to rectify the situation (if they'd just said "ha, ha you're shafted so give us 205 dollars" that would have been more helpful). As far as I know this is "attempting to obtain funds by deception" which is a crime in the UK. I am taking advice on this and will keep you posted on what the outcome is.
In reality it makes little difference as most people came to the site via a search engine rather than directly by typing in the URL and I shall just register it as a .net than .com. I just find this kind of practice unhelpful, sly and try to challenge it wherever I can.
Again, many thanks for the info.
If the domain was worth anything at all, it will most likely have been registered by a third party reseller as soon as it was made available for sale following the end of the redemption period - pretty common practise.
If a domain is of any value to you, expiry with the intent of re-purchasing is not the way to go I'm afraid - transfer to another Registrar if within the acceptable timescales, or renew then transfer if not.
R.
