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Network Solutions using dirty tactic to sell more domain names!

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]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Blog/Web Related, Tips & Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.