Suddenly this bill showed up in your email for $200. A $200 redemption fee for a domain that originally cost ten bucks. It's a story that's repeated thousands of times every month. It's too late to worry about assigning blame. As someone once said, establishing responsibility is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.
The RAA (Registrar Accreditation Agreement) between ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) asks the Registrars to send out at least two notices as reminders before your domain expires. If you contact your Registrar and complain because he didn't let you know it was expiring he will almost certainly tell you that he did try to contact you.
He will probably have some sort of digital documentation to prove it. You, on the other hand, don't have any documentation one way or the other; after all, if your bookkeeping was that good you wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
But two hundred dollars does seem like a steep penalty for a little memory lapse. ICANN suggests a redemption fee of eighty dollars ($80), but like most of ICANN's suggestions (including the 45 day auto-renewal grace period), the registrars seem to take them or leave them as they see fit. Some of the Registrars do go along with ICANN's suggestion, and some charge a bit more, $100 or $160.
The highest redemption figure I was able to find without a lot of digging was $200. There is however, no reason to believe that the upper limit couldn't go considerably above $200; in the economy's current condition I would be willing to bet on it.
As ever the best advice is keep a sharp eye on your investment. Know when your renewal time arrives and don't count on the tender mercies of the registrars.
No comments:
Post a Comment