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Friday, August 14, 2009

7 things you MUST know before registering a domain

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 is 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.

We do NOT charge any transfer-out fee. Click here to transfer your domain to us and to get one year renewal.

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 to verify the real expiration date for your domain. It should match up with the number of years you paid your registrar for.

We register the domain as many years as per your request right away. You will be able to see the same in the WHOIS database with-in 24 hours of the registration.

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 every time you make an edit to your record, preventing you from moving the name out to another registrar.

You will get the control panel and you are free to change WHOIS information as many times as you wish. We provide a locking mechanism for you in the control panel and we strongly suggest you to lock your domain as soon as you make changes. When you want to change WHOIS info, unlock the domain, do the changes as desired and lock it immediately to prevent any unauthorized transfers. Register your domain now.

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, not withstanding 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.

We do NOT offer WHOIS privacy services. We do not want clients who want to hide themselves by not publishing their identity in WHOIS database.

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.

Our control panel allows you to lock and unlock your domain and we strongly suggest to lock your domain as soon as you do any changes. We, ourself do not lock your domain.

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.

Your control panel lists the AUTH-CODE and is available for you all the time without even contacting us.

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 at 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.

At the time of registration and also in the control panel, you can specify the name server that you want. It defaults to our name server if you do not specify any and shows "Under Construction" page until you host your website or change the name server. We do not display any advertisements to make money from it, we just display our own logo and list our services.

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