G*rd*n said:
Recently, one of my web site clients found that her domain
name, which was registered through
www.registry.com, had
expired. She had not received any kind of bill, notice or
reminder in any form. However, the registrar offered to
"save" the domain name -- for $200. There seems to be
a considerable motivation here for the registrar to
"forget" to bill or remind the client that their domain
name is about to expire, or to "lose" the payment, and I
am wondering if others have had similar experiences with
www.registry.com or other registrars. Is this now a
regular thing?
A couple of thoughts come to mind here...
First, I really don't think a company would do anything in the way of
forgetting to notify the user of their domain expiring or losing the
payment... this is mainly because not only is it easier to keep people
happy than to try and make a few extra bucks, but also disgruntled customers
might cost you more in the way of future business (bad word of mouth) and/or
use up extra customer service resources as they try to get things resolved.
This is especially the case if the customer is using other services
(other domain names or if they offer hosting) where the loss could be alot
more than the gain (ie: losing $10/mo hosting for 2, 3, 4 or 5+ years to get
an extra $190).
As for what could have gone wrong... a few thoughts:
- Spam Filters: There are so many different spam filters out there: some
use a database of companies or IPs that spam... some just look for keywords
in the subject line or email body... in some cases the customer might have
clicked on a different email from the company about products or account
upgrades and added the company to their spam filter.
- Email Accounts: Most people have multiple email accounts... some assume
that their 'work' account (the one linked to the site) gets all their email
from their other accounts. It could be a case where the customer just
forgot what email account was getting the bills/notifications.
- Spam Reported: The company in question might just not send out
notifications about accounts about to expire. Not only does email tie up
resources and bandwidth (you might be thinking "How much email could it be?"
and if they have just 50-100 customers its not much... if they have 10 or 20
thousand customers then it can really build up) but also there are people
who are quick to pull the trigger and report a company for spamming, even
though they've signed up for a newsletter or getting email reports/updates,
etc.
Because of this I wouldn't be surprised if more and more companies stop
sending email notifications and just put everybody on a program of "you are
responsible for your domain names or can sign up for automatic renewal"
- Customer Fault: It is also possible that the customer just ignored the
notices and figured they could renew the domain name at $9 at any time, even
after it has expired... and then when they got dinged they complained to you
because they didn't want to pay more.
In the end it should be up to the customer to ensure their domain name
doesn't expire and any additional work the company does (sending
notifications/alerts) should be a secondary line of defense. As well,
domain names are cheap to renew for the long term... if they expect to be in
business in 3, 4 or 5 years from now... then why not renew the name for 5-10
years? 10 years = less than $100... any business should be able to afford
that as a one time in ten years cost (if they can't afford $100 then little
red flags should be going off in their head that they need to fix their
company)
Clint
(woohoo! this one wasn't a short novel!)