A domain name insider speaks out and
blows the lid off of the hidden "gotchas" domain registrars use to
leverage your domains, your traffic and your money to their advantage.
1. "Transfer-out"
fees
Buried in the fine print of a
registrars' "Terms of Service" will be a hidden fee authorizing them
to charge your credit card a "transfer-out" fee if you move your
domain to another registrar. Often times, this transfer-out fee are 2 or 3
times the cost of the original registration.
This practice violates the ICANN policy
on domain transfers. In most cases if this happens to you a simple call to your
credit card company will have the charge reversed, if you notice. Registrars
who use this practice play the numbers game as many will not.
2. The fine print from hell
Most people (read: nobody) actually
reads the long, odious Terms of Service for
anything they buy online. Some registrars bury truly chilling things in these
terms like the aforementioned "transfer-out" fees and in one
mind-boggling case a "power-of-attorney".
3. "Pay-as-you-go":
This is where you make a multi-year
interest-free loan to the registrar. It works like this: You register a domain
with them for example, 5 years (perhaps to obtain a discounted rate), you
expect your domain name to be registered for 5 years. Think again, some
registrars will pay the registry for 1 year and pocket the rest of your money.
Then for the rest of your five year term
they'll renew each year for one year. Usually this is coupled with a strict
"no-refunds" policy, so an odd situation occurs: they stand to make
more money from your original registration if they lose you as a customer
before your full 5 years are up, so providing poor service to the point where
you leave actually adds to their bottom line.
You can use a free whois lookup tool
like EasyWhois to verify the real expiration date for your domain. It should
match up with the number of years you paid your registrar for. Whois database
scams
4. Whois edit fees and locks
Every time you register a domain name,
the details of that domain registration must be published in a publicly
accessible database called Whois.
One of the functions a registrar is
supposed to be providing to you is the ability to change those whois records.
Some registrars (especially the bargain basement outfits) register your domain
for a dirt-cheap price and then ding you with an "administration fee"
when you want to edit your Whois record.
Some others may also
"lockdown" your domain for 60 days everytime you make an edit to your
record, preventing you from moving the name out to another registrar.
5. Premium whois privacy
services
Because your domain record is public for
all to see, some registrars want to upsell you to "privacy services"
or "whois masking", "private registration", where they put
their own info in the whois record instead of yours.
The important thing to know here is that
in the eyes of the domain Registry to which all the Registrars interact, and
the Registry's oversight body (like ICANN, or in Canada, CIRA), whoever is
listed in the domain whois record as the domain Registrant is the legal owner
of the domain name. Keep that in mind, if you use a service like this, they own
the domain, not you, notwithstanding whatever contract or Terms of Service you
enter into with them to "own" this name on your behalf. If it lands
in a dispute proceeding it will be an open and shut case: they own the name.
Taking it one step further, some
"privacy" services will get you to sign up for the whois privacy
service and then they turn around and happily offer to sell your true data to
anybody else who cares to pay for it.
6. Mining whois and domain
slamming
Because all the data is there for the
taking, spammers and marketers "mine" the whois database and harvest
registrant data including addresses, fax numbers and email addresses. This is a
real problem, and there have been very slow moving Whois database reform
processes creeping through ICANN as well as CIRA in Canada.
In the meantime though, people may
wonder why is it that shortly after they register a domain name, they start
getting all kinds of marketing spam in their mailbox. This is because their
email address is being harvested by robots from the Whois database. There is a
free service to protect your email address called MyPrivacy.ca.
The variation on this is some registrars
(and there is one outfit who is particularly notorious for this) which is
mining the whois database for registrant information, and then mailing out what
look like renewal invoices for either those domain names or variations of them.
Unsuspecting recipients think they've
received a renewal invoice on their domain and then remit payment, initiating a
domain transfer without realizing it. Surprise, you've been slammed. In the
worst cases your website and email comes crashing down as your DNS services
terminate with your old provider.
Domain lock-in (a.k.a you can check out
any time you like, but you can never leave)
7. The registrar-lock
There has historically been a real
problem with "domain slamming" (see above) and unauthorized domain
transfers, so the "registrar-lock" was created to protect a domain
against this. If the registrar lock is set, nobody can transfer your domain
away from you. This is actually a good thing and best practices include having
this set for all your domains. The sharper registrars enable it by default when
they register or transfer a domain for you.
Alas, this lock can become a real
problem for you if it is turned on and the registrar will not turn it off, or
give you the ability to turn it on or off yourself.
8. The domain auth-code
Some of the Top-Level-Domains (TLDs) run
on a protocol called "EPP" and to further guard against unauthorized
transfers, a domain must have an 8-character auth-code supplied before it will
transfer. Current examples are .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG. The current or
"losing" registrar holds this code. You need it if you want to move
your domain away. Hopefully they will give it to you. Traffic and monetization scams
9. Domain parking
You may not know this, but domain
parking is big business. You know when you click on a link somewhere or make a
typo entering a web address and you wind up on some crapola "search
page" optionally throwing up a million pop-up ads? That is a parked domain
and the larger players can park thousands of domains and make literally
millions of dollars "monetizing" them via domain parking.
You know who has access to thousands of
domains? Domain registrars. Some of them offer domain registrations and rock
bottom prices just so they can monetize the parked names. This may not bother
you, but some people don't realize they're paying for something their registrar
then uses to generate more revenue for themselves.
(Update: since the time of writing one
registrar in particular rolled out a "Make money from your domains' parked
pages" initiative, which surprised me since I knew them to be one of the
biggest parked page monetizers around - they make millions per month monetizing
their customers' parked domains - until I looked at the details: Packages start
at 3.99/month.
They are actually charging their
customers for domain parking monetization. What audacity. If you actually have
a domain that's actually worth something parked, take it to a parking service.
They pay you to park your pages. Not the other way around).
10. "Free" URL
Forwarding
Some people may wonder why the price
ranges vary so much for domain registrations and what the difference is between
somebody who offers everything but the kicthen sink for $2/year while others
charge more than 10 times that much for basic DNS and URL forwarding.
Well the low cost one often has other
tricks up their sleeve for making money, either by adding your domain to their
parked pool (above) or in this case, they offer "free" URL forwarding
for your domain, and then sell pop-up or pop-under advertisements on your
domain. You know, those things people like so much.
WISH YOU THE BEST AS YOU ADHERE TO THIS!
