Slashdot Mirror
What to Do When Your ISP Steals Your Domain?
sahonen asks: "Some web hosting providers also provide domain registration on the side, which is great for users who want to keep things simple. What ends up happening, though, is the user will want to switch hosting providers, but their old host will hold on to the domain to try and lock the user in. I've seen this happen many times and it's not pretty. This happened to a friend of mine just recently and he's asking me for advice. I don't want him to have to buy another domain when he's worked so hard to establish his old one. Aren't domains legal property (we are in the US here)? Can he nail the old host for cybersquatting? And for the philosophers, how do these hosts expect to maintain a good reputation when they engage in such unscrupulous business practices?"
Back when I was helping a friend with his startup ISP, a few customers just decided they weren't going to pay. Our names were on the domain and the registration, and we were pretty nice about all of this until one of the guys let on that the others KNEW that we'd never turn them off because we were too nice to be in business and that they had all talked and decided if we were going to force them to pay, they'd go with one of the other guys (former friend) that had started an webhosting business himself.
I ended up redirecting those guys domains to porn sites and removing their names from the registration to ensure that it had to come though us.
That was my last task before I decided they were right...I don't like being a jerk and certain sectors in business were not what I wanted to deal with if thats what ya had to be, and I picked up my current university gig (as well as freeing me up for my other consulting gig -- see above URL).
Sadly, my former partner didn't agree with my opinion that he should keep those domain names current so they never could get them back. Joker is like $7 a year, and that would have been about $35 at most...well worth it...about 6 months after this, they started getting their domains back, but without the traffic they use to get.
There is always two sides to these stories...I don't know the other side of the story with the original poster, BUT there is probably something we aren't hearing (even if the guy IS morally correct).
If you surf down to Score:1 (or visit http://slashdot.org/~sahonen and surf his replies ) you'll find the following:
"Dan Cervantes is the owner of the Big Boy Drum company. The problem is that the ISP won't let him transfer the DNS to the server he wants to move his web site to, actually a web host I run. No, I won't plug it, 'cause we're near our bandwidth limit already."
Since when has a ISP had any control over DNS changes? Why even talk to them about it? Go directly to http://www.corenic.org/ and move the damn thing yourself.
"As much as a refund would be nice, the site was down before it got linked to on slashdot, I think the ISP took it down when Dan cancelled his hosting. But they kept the domain name."
They don't have the domain name. Whois clearly says that Dan does. It sounds to me that you simply don't understand the difference between an ISP and a DNS.
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