This is NOT common practice among CIRA registrars, in fact only one
registrar does it, and that is the family of operations run by
Internic.ca, which includes domainsatcost.ca and hostmaster.ca (which
are all the same outfit)
I have railed against this practice from day one, I made it known
in my run for the CIRA board that I would have something to say about
this if elected (which I wasn't, oh well)
I brought this up again on the .CA registrars list last week as a
client of ours blamed us for a missing year that was in fact witheld
by internic.ca. Pretty well all of the other registrars agree that this
practice is bad for business (except the one doing it, who is oddly silent
on the matter)
According to the CIRA rules, you can do this only if you make it
clear to your client that you are doing this. Why Internic gets to
get away with clearly not doing this is a mystery me and to most of
the other registrars.
I would encourage everyone who has an opinion on this to attend the
CIRA AGM in December and make your concerns known to the CIRA board.
-mark
On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Heather Peel wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I just spoke to a new hosting client about his domain registrar and
> I'm not sure if what they are doing is even legal or contravenes
> CIRA's rules.
>
> The registrar apparantly accepts payment for multiple domain years,
> and yet, does not actually pay CIRA for them. My client paid them
> for 5 years and I noticed that his expiry date showed Dec. 2001. I
> asked him about this and when he contacted the registrar, he was
> told that they had a problem with people registering for multiple
> years and then transferring their domain elsewhere...therefore they
> only register one year at a time and the money is held in trust in
> the meantime. My first thought was what if they went out of
> business?
>
> I know I would not be comfortable dealing with a registrar who did
> this, but it may be common practice for all I know.
>
> The other thing that irked my client was that they openly pass
> along the credit card fees. They advertise the price as $x.xx but
> when you are billed, they tack the 4% credit card fee on top! I
> know that is against my credit card merchant agreement. Makes me
> wonder. Needless to say, even though I charge $10 more to register
> domains than this company, my client is using us to register them
> from now on!
>
> Curious to hear what everyone else thinks of these business
> practices. I also apologize if this is received more than once, I
> had trouble sending.
>
> Heather
> The Net Now
>
--
mark jeftovic
http://www.easydns.com
http://mark.jeftovic.net
