On: Do not register a domain name with your hosting pr...

[lutusp]

I have heard accounts that, in the past, NetworkSolutions.com (owned by Web.com) would charge a ransom of $99 to anyone who tries to move a domain name away along with their business:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/web-com/web-hosting/jacksonville...

For balance, I recently moved my registration from networksolutions.com, based on the reasoning of the linked article, and nothing like that happened -- there was no problem and no extra charges. Nevertheless, it's good advice to avoid registering a domain with a provider.

[akanster → lutusp]

Shady company. For a while if you used their domain availability lookup, they would register the domain, forcing you to pay them if you wanted it.

http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/network-solutions-registeri...

[lutusp → akanster]

Thanks -- that was educational. I'm now twice as glad that I moved away from them. I recently tried to move away from Web.com (who owns networksolutions.com) as well, after they were unable to repair my server for five consecutive days. Their response to my announcement was to ignore my e-mails and continue to charge me $89.95 per month as though I was still their customer. I finally had to lodge a complaint with the BBB to force them to refund the phony charges (which they did).

My favorite story about Web.com, and among the reasons I left them, was when I started computerizing my financial records and noticed this pattern of dates for their monthly charges:

     2011-11-09
     2011-12-07
     2012-01-04
     2012-02-01
     2012-02-29
     2012-03-28
     2012-04-25
     2012-05-23
     2012-06-20
     2012-07-18
     2012-08-15
     2012-09-12
     2012-10-10
     2012-11-08

Notice anything funny? They're 28 days apart. Web.com is claiming that they have a monthly rate, but they charge it every 28 days, which automatically gives them a (30.43/28) 8.7% revenue increase over what they would get if they were honest.

I usually discount stories about shady business dealings without direct evidence. This time there's direct evidence.

[goldfeld → akanster]

That seemed like a wonderful opportunity to set up a script that looked up thousands of bogus domain names (e.g. aaabbbcccddd.com) to spike them.

[mutagen → goldfeld]

Network Solutions (and others) were abusing a 5 day grace period in which refunds were available. Ostensibly this was to address typos and mistakes. Domain squatters would also abuse it by registering thousands of typos and random word combinations names and use the grace period to get a 'taste' [1] of traffic. If they thought they could monetize the domain, they'd keep it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting

[h2s → goldfeld]

A lot of people did exactly this when the story broke on Slashdot.

http://slashdot.org/story/08/01/08/1920215/nsi-registers-eve...

[jordanthoms → goldfeld]

Unfortunately, they can often use the 'trial period' to register the domain after you search for it and then 'return' it a few days later to avoid having to actually pay for the domain.