A couple of months ago, I wrote about a domain name that we were eyeing on was gone a few hours later after doing lookup for it, and then found it was registered by a company called UltraRPM aka MetaPredict. And now, it seems like a renown domain name registrar, Network Solutions is also doing the same dirty tactic.
Network Solutions was a dominant in domain name registration, which they used to charge pretty high price, $35 per domain. But, recent years, with many rivals coming up and offering pretty low price, as low as $8 per domain, Network Solutions seems to have hard time to gain new customers, although they’re still making good profit from the renewals of domains that registered with them before.
According to TechCrunch, Network Solutions now has jumped on the dirty tactic bandwagon. Similar to UltraRPM, which they will register the domain name immediately in their own name after a user does a search for the domain name for the availability. So, the user will have no choice either to give up that domain name or buy it from Network Solutions for a much higher price of $35 per year!
So far they’ve registered over 72,000 domain names based on user searches. These domain names snatched away by Network Solutions are all temporarily assigned a name server of “reserveddomainname” – the number of registrations pointing to this server is public data and can be seen here.
Registering many of these domain names, will not cost Network Solutions a single cent. A registrar is given a 5-day grace period, which is a rule for registrar to off the hook for credit card fraud. But, now, Network Solutions is using the grace period to stop users from going to competitors, which is definitely outside of the original reasons for the rule.
For a user, if you ain’t wanna pay high price $35 per year to Network Solutions, just wait for 5 working days, the domain will mostly be deleted and available for registration again. Then you can proceed for the registration. And remember, don’t do a search anymore, register the domain name at once for not to give Network Solutions a second chance! (Our domain name that was snatched away by UltraRPM was released after 5 days.)
via [Buzz Corner], [TechCrunch]
January 12th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Hi Chee
Good tip here for good domain name seekers. Its unfair that they horde all those fantastic names and mark up higher to sell to the unknown public.
Nice meeting you at the All Malaysian Blogger Project at MidValley.
January 12th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Hi May, thanks, btw what about the All Malaysian Blogger Project at MidValley????
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:01 am
If the authors of the Tech Crunch, and this follow-up article would call Network Solutions to simply ask what is going on and why they’d hear the following:
- Network Solutions provides a service of searching domains.
- Other members of the web are sniffing or otherwise intercepting domainname search requests, registering them and holding them for the 4-5 grace period afforded them – efftively holding them hostage.
- Network SOlutions does register immediately to a) protect the user’s from an unnecessary lock-in to another provider – but if they desire to purchase from those providers, Network Solutions says that they will relinquish the ‘hold’ at no charge. and b) Protect their own interest, for those customers who recognize value of using Network Solutions search tools, adn wish to continu to do business with them – albeit at a higher than market best price point.
- Ask the other ‘quick registration artists’ if they will release the quickly-held domain names at no charge for purchase through another provider and then decide if Network Solutions is the bad guy or not.
They are not hoarding, they are not unfair, and actually – by quick-hold and release upon request – they keep the public from being high-jacked by the real hoarders.
Good luck.