Slimy advertising

My business domain name, internetmessagingtechnology.org, is registered by my hosting service, and the registration is included in the fee I pay them for hosting. They automatically renew it each year, as long as my account is paid up. It’s something I don’t have to worry about.

As it happens, it expires on 3 Feb each year. But, as I said, I don’t care; it’s automatically renewed.

The folks at Domain Registry of America would have me care. They want to take my business. And that would be fine — that’s what businesses do. Except they’re not being straight about it.

If they were being straight, they’d send me a flyer that tells me why their hosting service is better than what I have. They’d sell their service to me and give me an incentive to switch.

That’s not what they did. Instead, they sent me a “Domain Name Expiration Notice”, warning me that my “domain name registration is due to expire”, and that “failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.”

Yes, sprinkled throughout the text are other things that say — if you read it carefully — that they’re asking me to switch from my current registrar to them. But this is intentionally laid out and worded to look like a bill from my registrar for a simple renewal. It’s misleading, and that’s not an accident. (And, to boot, their “Registration Agreement” is printed on the back of the “notice”, a solid 8 inches by 8 inches of four-point, low-contrast type! (Click the image on the right to see it.))

No, I won’t be doing business with them, because I don’t like their marketing choices. They remind me of spammers.