In the past one of the companies that I used for domain registrationwas Hostway. Overall they seemed to be a pretty reputable company, and also seemed to offer pretty competitive prices for their services.
A few of the domain names I’ve registered with them in the past have been coming up for renewal now. A strange thing is that the registration reminders that I’m getting for these domain names are all coming from a company called DomainPeople. Here’s an example of one of these letters:
support1@domainpeople.com
to danny
More options 6:11 pm (1½ hours ago)
Dear Domain Name Registrant,Your domain name expires today — Sun, 05 Nov 2006!
Renew right now at http://www.domainpeople.com/renew
Please Note: Once the domain has expired, it will be placed on hold. While on hold, you will not be able to use your domain name in any way – including your web site, e-mail address or e-mail forwarding.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us anytime, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. E-mail us at support@domainpeople.com or call us toll-free in North America at 1-877-734-3667 or internationally at +1-604-639-1680.
Sincerely,
DomainPeople Customer Support
support@domainpeople.com
http://www.domainpeople.com
I heard something in the past about Hostway buying this company DomainPeople, to handle the some domain registration services, so in the back of my mind I wasn’t too alarmed about getting this email for domain name renewal from a different company than the one I used for registration.
This relationship is all explained in a bit more detail on a FAQ page on the Hostway site:
Who are AAAQ and DomainPeople?
AAAQ and DomainPeople are the domain name registrars Hostway has partnered with to process domain name registrations. On the Whois record for your domain name, AAAQ or DomainPeople will be listed as the domain name registrar. In particular, DomainPeople is the registrar for .info, .pro, and .us domain names.
Well, the tricky thing about this all is that – if you follow the link in the email reminder from DomainPeople – they end up wanting to charge you $35 dollars for your domain name renewal!
Hummmpf! Well, luckily I was still able to find my old Hostway account information … logged into my control panel, and was able to manage my domains from there. Renewal price? $6.95!
This seems almost scandalous to me. Is this some sort of scam that Hostway is using to increase their profit margins? Has anyone else encountered this same inconsistancy in trying to renew a domain name registered by Hostway?
Strange enough, when I’ve googled for ‘Domainpeople Suck‘ or ‘Domainpeople Scam‘, I haven’t found too many negative comments… however one blogger – RFJason – describes the DomainPeople as being utterly clueless!
Posted by Danny 
