Always After Me Coveted Domain
Thursday, March 23, 2006
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt for the moment, but my domain hosting company may very well have lost a customer or worse. I have eight domains with them, all of them "automatically renewing." We were veritable lifetime business partners. At least, you'd think they'd try to keep my business. The issue right now is that one of those eight domains was cancelled. By them. It's no longer in my account. I have no control over it.The hosting company asserts that I didn't follow the fine print in the service agreement about my contact information. It generally states that if my contact info isn't up-to-date, then they have the option of canceling my domain (i.e., taking ownership of the offending domain, I'm certain).
Let me tell you about that contact info: It had a valid e-mail address (unfortunately, one that I hadn't checked in about a month due to us tending to a newborn child, but it is valid and active), a mostly valid snail mail address that says "Norway" instead of "USA" for some ungodly reason, my real name, and a phony phone number (1111111111) because I'd like at least some privacy. So it's not perfect, but it still gives you some options for contacting me. (Anyone with two braincells to rub together can tell that my address is in the U.S., not Norway.)
So one might assume the hosting company is just strict about their service agreement, but there is a shady part to all this. The above contact information was applied to all eight of my domains, which includes the one they cancelled. Why would my hosting company pick on one particular domain and leave the rest alone? Perhaps because I had seven average domain names and one highly coveted domain. I'll let you guess which one they chose to take from me.
Sigh...
So, I've called them and subsequently sent an e-mail and am now waiting to hear their end of it. Already I've used two channels to communicate with them versus their single inconspicuous e-mail sent to a single e-mail account despite the fact that the hosting company itself has my home telephone number, home address, billing information, alternate e-mail address and God-knows-what other information. Best case scenario, they say, "Oh, we were just being strict and that domain was luck of the draw. Please take it back with our apologies and update all of your contact info." Then I say, "Thank you," and cautiously take my domain back into custody... The worst case scenario probably involves lawyers and a lot of blog posts.
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