April 2005

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I hate annoyances. I hate it when someone fixes something that isn't broken, particularly if in doing so they turn the something into an annoyance. That has happened with the company through which my domains are registered.

The company has a revamped website which is less user-friendly. And the company has embarked on a program of wanting customers who have registered multiple domains to synchronize them, thus having to pay for all the renewals at once. I have no intention of doing that, because I can't afford that much of a wallop.

So far, the company is not requiring the synchronization. If this happens, I'll take my business elsewhere. But if you don't sign up for it, or at least on the automatic renewal plan, the company has instituted the annoying practice of sending e-mail once a week, showing all the domains you own that will expire in the next several months.

And that is annoying. I appreciate being reminded more than once, but the prior practice of sending reminders once a month for the three months up to expiration dates worked just fine for me. The prior way was automated; it's not as though some overworked person had to sit there and write to each customer three times...four if you let it get within five days.

But I don't need to be reminded every week between now and July that one of my domains expires the middle of that month. I need to be reminded around the first of that month. This new thing is all-or-nothing; you can either get the weekly nags or get none, and I don't really want to go without any prompting.

I am not willing to sign up for the automatic renewal because I use my debit card to pay for the domains, and I need to be the one deciding which day I can afford to pay for something from my checking account. The company does these charges twenty days before the expiration date, which wouldn't always work out to be a good time to want money from me, depending on my payday.

So, for the time being, I will allow the annoyances to come, though I may well complain to the company. I definitely will not recommend the company to anyone else at this point. If you have registered domains through the company on my recommendation, I'm sorry if the new practices are annoying to you, too. Please know I never recommended the company for any financial gain; I just liked and trusted it.

I still trust it. But at the moment I don't like it very much at all.