Domain Registry of America
I have been getting these annoying “Domain Name Expiration Notice” courtesy mails for years now from “Domain Registry of America”. While *I* know these things are a bunch of hooey, when I have fairly sharp customers calling to ask me what they should do and should they pay it, then these “courtesy” notices go too far.
Most of my customers don’t get bothered with this because we normally do all the registering and maintaining of domains for our customers, but there are a few that get these confusing letters. And I do believe every web customer that HAS gotten one has called me at some point. There is nothing more scary for a lot of these people than losing their website and domain presence. A website and domain are arguably right up there in importance with a phone number. I have had clients that I have never even spoken to and everything has been completely in email. And of course, if you lose your domain, your email sort of goes bye bye too. I think I’d honestly rather have the email than the phone. WIth email, there’s some tracking capability, but that’s getting off topic.
“Domain Registry of America” or as they are found on the web, droa.com, (if you’ll notice, I’m not even giving these clowns the backlink to their website) practices what is called “domain slamming”. As a matter of fact, after the top 2 entries when searching for “Domain Registry of America”, the next entry is Wikipedia’s entry FOR “domain slamming”. This is the rough equivalent of telephone slamming in the internet age. Remember when you would get calls from Sprint, MCI and a number of other people back in the 80’s and 90’s all urging you to use their long distance telephone service? And you might have found yourself getting bills from various different companies that you don’t think you ever even spoke to? They would basically confuse the heck out of you, pass you on to a supervisor after you’d confirmed your name was John Smith and the next thing you know, you were paying twice as much for phone calls. This is roughly what Domain Registry of America” does for domains.
So, should you pay that thing? If you have Lizardwebs web hosting, the answer will definitely be “no”. If you use GoDaddy (conveniently, http://www.godaddy.com/), you can get your domains for about $20 less per year. However, if you REALLY want to pay $35/year, call us at Lizardwebs – we’ll be more than happy to charge you $35/year. We normally charge 15/year (depending on the TLD -.com,.net, etc) or include it as part of annual web hosting, but if you have the money you want to throw, we’ll be happy to help you. If you DO have a questions whether you should pay them, give us a call and we’ll be glad to see who your registrar is for you and whether you should pay or not.
JUST SAY NO TO DOMAIN REGISTRY OF AMERICA.
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