You’d think after having to fork out $160 to redeem a valued domain name that I would have learned my lesson.
Just yesterday, I was ploughing through the pile of emails I’d received from GoDaddy over the past few months. Usually, I pay attention to emails from the registrars I use, but GoDaddy used to send me a lot of marketing emails so I’d gotten used to not paying them much attention. I did eventually unsubscribe from all of their newsletters, but ever since ICANN handed over all of RegisterFly’s domains to them I’ve received a constant stream of renewal reminders for domains I was no longer interested in keeping since I’d transferred all of my important domains to NameCheap already. Then I noticed one of my most valuable domains mentioned in one of the early emails.
“Crap!”, I thought.
It was the .com version of my web design business’ .co.uk domain. I thought it was safely out of the hands of RegisterFly and into the care of NameCheap, but I was wrong. It had been reassigned to GoDaddy in the great ICANN sweep and it was due for renewal… Over a month ago!
This meant that it was in redemption and I had to pay a rather hefty $80 in order to get it back. It’s not a domain I actively use as it’s simply an add-on to the .co.uk equivalent, but it was important it didn’t get into the hands of a domain squatter so I felt obliged to rescue it.
Damn it!
Technorati Tags: GoDaddy, ICANN, RegisterFly, Domain Names, Redemption
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Ouch, that redemption fee is so annoying. I’ve never been hit with it but one of my clients never paid up for his domain (even calling to tell me to stop hassling him for the invoice payment after we sent him a reminder) and when he finally realised, in was in redemption so he had to pay up the $160 fee.
Recently my actual business domain wasn’t renewed at Nominet by 123-reg despite me renewing it with them. Nominet emailed me the day after expiry and then I had to spend my morning getting it all sorted out with 123-reg before I lost my business email!
My .coms and .nets that I want to keep, I set to auto register at eNom. There’s always cash in the account and it just means I can forget about them and leave them renewing when the time comes.
Sometimes I wish I could leave clients to manage their own domains and leave me out of the loop so it’s entirely their responsibility to renew on time, but I just know that it would make things harder for me in terms of things like nameserver changes or having to get involved in redeeming!
I’m starting to look at names.co.uk for my .uk domains rather than 123-reg. Although I’ve not had any trouble with 123-reg, a lot of other people seem to have. Also, if PIPEX are running the show then there’s good enough reason to start looking elsewhere…
Yeah I’ve got a deal with a friend who runs our ADSL and has his own Nominet tag so I’m moving my domains to him at some point. It may cost a couple of quid extra but that cost is saved on my time that I’ve wasted dealing with 123-reg!
Having someone you already trust to look after your domains seems like a great idea.
Sometimes, it seems a bit strange to think we trust our valuable domain names to complete strangers especially when they turn out to be fraudsters.