Ugh . . . don't let your domains expire

[shmokes]

I have a domain through which all my primary email addresses are set up.  I had paid to register it for two or three years, I can't remember.  The email account I gave to the registrar is mostly junk and I rarely check it anymore (so I did not see the warning emails).  The other day all my email accounts stopped working.  My domain had expired so I tried to renew it.  Not possible.  The domain is in a "redemption grace period" where it is expired, but nobody but me can buy it for a period of time.  Sounds nice, except it will cost $160+registration costs to reregister my domain.  It's called a redemption fee.

I can't believe this is even legal.  Obviously it is extortion.  It doesn't cost them anymore to register it now than it would have a month ago.  Even if I could afford $160 I would not fund this crap.  So now I just have to wait 30-45 days for the domain to go back on the open market and hopefully pick it up again.  In the mean time I will miss many emails and I will have to go to at least a dozen sites and change my registration info so important emails go to working email accounts.  Incredibly frustrating.  I'm so angry.

[saint]

You will not pick it up again if you don't buy it now. It will be harvested by the domain registrar or another one the microsecond the redemption period expires and will be put on the market for a bunch more than $160. You're only at the beginning of the extortion and the price tag only goes up from here.

I could be wrong, but I bet I'm not.  If those domains mean anything to you buy them now.

--- saint

[CheffoJeffo]

+1 to what saint said -- the only reason that you didn't lose the domain entirely yet is because it has to go through RGP.

Having said that $160 is pretty high.

[ark_ader]

I will not bother and my old domain will expire in September.  Yahoo Domains charges $35 for a year for renewals, and that is $35 too much (at the moment).  Yet it is $45 for five years.....

It is far cheaper to register a new domain than revive an old one.

Want to know what is really interesting?

mameplanet.com is available!   

Race ya!

[shmokes]

 If those domains mean anything to you buy them now.

I hope you're wrong, but I won't do it regardless.  For me it's like negotiating with terrorists.  I may want my hostage back, but I will not legitimize their business practices by allowing them to make money off me in this way.  I REALLY want this domain back (it's my first-name-last-name.com), but I can certainly live my life without it.

I registered the domain with the three big domain backorder companies so hopefully the second the domain goes back on the market it will get picked up by one of them.  That will cost me $60 or $70 -- still more than I'd like to pay, but at least it's not so disgusting from an ethical standpoint. 

If I lose the domain I will be sad, but it is a lesson learned.  And I can't imagine the registrar will sit on it forever.  That costs money and they're unlikely to ever sell it.  They certainly will never sell it to me, and I don't have a very common name.  Eventually it won't make much business sense to sit on the domain.

The only silver lining is that if I ever find myself opening my own law firm I have an idea for my first class action law suit.   

[AtomSmasher]

A similar thing happened to me a few years ago, although it only cost me around $60 to get it back.  I thought $60 was incredibly high, but $160 is just absurd.

[shmokes]

ICANN recommends $80, but registrars are free to charge whatever they like. 

[jfunk]

Can I ask who your registrar is?

[shmokes]

Tucows through the service provider Powweb.com

[RayB]

AFAIK Tucows is a "wholesaler". So really your "registrar" is Powwebs. Actually, calling them a "reseller" might be a better term. By going through re-sellers, you accept Terms that can be whatever they feel like and it's perfectly permissible since they aren't bound by ICANN, Tucows is. After the redemption period, they can do things like auction off your domain instead of releasing it to the public. It SUCKS! This is how GoDaddy makes money.

Did you try calling them up? I've let domains expire before and the cost to renew during redemption period was the SAME as the normal renewal (ie: $10 - $15 range). I guess times have changed or maybe it depends on the registrar.

I've used these guys for years:
http://www.directnic.com/
https://www.hover.com/ 

Hover market themselves as a email and  forwarding service, but they are basically a domain registrar. They have an auto-renew feature that is on by default.

[Dartful Dodger]

My first and last name is the same first and last name of a musician and a comedian.  A few years ago my first and last name dot com looked like it was created for a college project owned by a college student.  For years he would never update it and would take two weeks to re-register it.  For those two weeks I would try and register it every morning and every night until he re-register it.  I assumed there was some grace period and with his current track record of re-registering it after it expired there's be a good change he'd slip up.  At the time I had firstname lastname dot net.

Anyway a few years ago this guy let his domain expire for three weeks and now it's mine.  For the first few months I would get personal emails for this guy.

The comedian picked up my firstnameLastname.net a few months after I let it expire.  I held on to it for a year after I got firstnamelastname.com, just in case someone still used that email.  

I sometimes wonder if he gets emails for me and talks about them and how he stole .net from me in his act.

[ark_ader]

My first and last name is the same first and last name of a musician and a comedian.  A few years ago my first and last name dot com looked like it was created for a college project owned by a college student.  For years he would never update it and would take two weeks to re-register it.  For those two weeks I would try and register it every morning and every night until he re-register it.  I assumed there was some grace period and with his current track record of re-registering it after it expired there's be a good change he'd slip up.  At the time I had firstname lastname dot net.

Anyway a few years ago this guy let his domain expire for three weeks and now it's mine.  For the first few months I would get personal emails for this guy.

The comedian picked up my firstnameLastname.net a few months after I let it expire.  I held on to it for a year after I got firstnamelastname.com, just in case someone still used that email.  

I sometimes wonder if he gets emails for me and talks about them and how he stole .net from me in his act.

I would have given him a sub domain and hosted his site out of kindness. 

[SavannahLion]

I used to think my last name wasn't common (I'm Italian, and it specifically doesn't exist amongst Italians unless they're related to me) until I tried to pick up lastname.com and it was taken by a model (from the Philippines IIRC apparently it's a common last name there). I spent years trying to snatch the name until one cycle, I completely forgot and the name was released. Unfortunately, it was picked up by one of those domain squatters locked into a yearly automatic renewal process and has been that way ever since. I can buy it, but I'll have to pay their exorbitant fees. Apparently the model who owned that domain didn't think it was worth it.

I've settled on mylastname.net and have one of those domain snipers to watch for that domain to free up.

Point being, you have to decide how important this domain is to you. If you let it go free into the wild it almost guarantees you'll won't own it again for a long time.

[Dartful Dodger]

I would have given him a sub domain and hosted his site out of kindness. 

His site was a simple one page thing with an image of his college's mascot, talking about how wonderful his college is.  It didn't change in the 3 years I was trying to register it, so I assumed it was a homework assignment he did in college, and he was keeping the domain for the email address.

My job is programming internet applications and databases, so I wanted it for professional reasons, plus I wanted to own my name.

[Blanka]

It's a problem with .com and .net names. They are too cheap. Some big parties can make a reservation on a name without actually paying for it. This is what happens. They see it is available, and the reserve it. Best thing is to let the reservation void. It'll take a bit, but then it's available again. Here in Holland, it won't happen to .nl names, as they are at least 3 euro/year and are coupled to a person.

The best thing that can happen to .com and .net names, is that they get a minimum fee of say 2$ per reservation. If that becomes truth, these spam-redirect companies won't be able to make serious business out of expired domaind any longer. It becomes too expensive for them to reserve all those domains.

[Havok]

I REALLY want this domain back (it's my first-name-last-name.com), but I can certainly live my life without it.

I am so stealing this domain from you, I've always wanted to have pimple-mcstiltskin.com for my very own!

[shmokes]

The world became a bit less dismal today.  The backorder worked.    I'm the master of my domain again.   

I am very glad I did not cave and pay the $160 my registrar was charging during the redemption period.  It caused me quite a lot of headache, but it's only been about a month and a half and I'm very glad that my old registrar did not get any money out of me (and never will again).  FWIW, the registrar is PowWeb, which is one of Tucows registrars.

So my mistake cost me $60, but this is $60 for a legitimate service.  It sucks to spend that much to register a domain for one year, but at least it's fair and is a bargain compared to the extortion my former registrar was pulling.

[jfunk]

Congrats.  Glad it worked out.

I played with the backordering stuff on my hosting provider (godaddy)..  Forgot to change my backorder to something I really wanted, so ended up with a year of a fairly ridiculous domain name..  Oh, well, wasn't much $, fortunately.. 

[SavannahLion]

Congrats on getting your domain back. Who are you going to go with once the year is up?

After this thread, I decided to look a little deeper into what would happen if I was caught in the same situation as Shmokes. Two of my domains go up for renewal next year. I still haven't found the info anywhere on my registrar's site, but I did discover some things I never really thought about. First, from a second hand source, it would cost me $200 if I were to try and revive it. Yikes!

I also found out my provider is Enom (funny my host never mentions that anywhere that I've seen)

And Enom isn't exactly listed at Verisign (I think), neither is Powweb for that matter. I need to look into it more, I'm running a bit of a fever. But am I missing something here? Aren't top level registrars supposed to be well... registered somewhere and everyone else eg Tucows, just resellers?

[shmokes]

I'm not sure.  Moniker.com is who got my domain back for me.  I actually feel a little affinity to them for that.  But I'm going to check with them and see what they charge for redemption and stuff like that.  If they're legit I'll probably pay for a decade of registration (which would cost $80 through them).  I think it can be had cheaper elsewhere, though, so it mostly comes down to whether I think I'm dealing with honest people.

[RayB]

Check if they have auto-renewal. If so, then you're golden.

Hover.com and Directnic.com both have auto-renewal options. In Hover's case, it's on by default as is transfer lock.

[shmokes]

They do . . . but so did my last registrar.  Problem is, I moved to a new state and closed the bank account that my old registrar had on file.  So they weren't able to auto-renew.

[SirPeale]

I pay $12/year via Joker.Com.

[shmokes]

Moniker's a good price compared to that.  $8/year.  So we'll see.  I'm going to pay for 10 years up front so I avoid having to deal with anything like this for a while.  Going with your registrar would cost me $50 more, but if I do some research and decide that my new registrar is shady and yours is run by good people, I'd be willing to pay a bit extra.