Since I was in high school, I have been the owner of several domain names. In total, I own about a dozen. Maintaining registration of a domain name is a rather simple affair, one just has to pay a registrar to renew it every year or renew in bulk for several years at a time. Today's irritation, however, comes from a company called Domain Registry of America (dmoa.com). I'm not linking it because I don't want my PageRank vote to go to them.

What DROA does is rather ingenious. Whenever a domain is about to expire, they send a letter to the technical contact of that domain name (real letter, post office-style) telling them that they need to renew and that they can do so by returning the simple form at the bottom of the page or going to their website and paying the $30 renewal fee. Of course, I have never had a domain registered through them, so what they are actually asking me to do is to perform a transfer to them. I find this whole thing to be insufferable because it does not matter how many times I tell them to remove me from their mailing lists, they still continue to send these to me. Today, I accused them of running a scam (which sending things that look very similar to bill might rightly be called), and got into an argument with their customer service person. I was told that I had to "back up what I say" if I was going to go "throwing acusations."

Essentially, the business model of this place seems to be to prey on people who do not understand how the DNS registration system works. These people are the ones most likely to accidentally begin transfers in response to such letters. I don't believe that switching registrars is ever something that one simply wants to get up and do because it often is somewhat time consuming to correctly configure a new registrar (I should know, I've changed registrars twice in the last year). Unfortunately, their business model must be working because I've been getting as many as 8 of these a year for the past 5 years.



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