If you’re like me, you get a lot of junk mail. But at my house, there’s one piece of mail I get frequently that infuriates me. In fact, my wife can tell from my reaction exactly what I’ve received.
In my business, I have a large number of domains registered for my clients, which means I get lots of mail from Internet Domain Name Services (iDNS). This company has some kind of Internet crawler that identifies domains that are up for renewal soon, and they in turn target the registered owners of the domains.
What makes me angry about this is not that I get mail from this company; it’s that unsuspecting consumers are bothered by this company and their ridiculously inflated domain renewal prices.
Here it is by the numbers from iDNS: 1 year domain renewal=$45.00, 2 years=$80.00 and 3 years=$180.00. For $180.00, my customers can renew their domains for over 10 years (I currently charge $17.99 per year).
As annoying as this is, it is not illegal. iDNS does state “this is not a bill, it is rather an easy means of payment should you decide to switch your domain registration to Internet Domain Name Services.” The folks at iDNS are simply hoping that you’ll either be too panicked that your domain will expire without notice, or you just won’t notice that it isn’t actually a bill.
This has been a public service announcement.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at joe@borealissystems.net.
Joe Bowen
President
Borealis Systems
