We would like to make our customers aware of another domain renewal scam doing the rounds. The company , also called Domain Registry of American (DroA) are now calling themselves the Domain Renewal Group. They basically target domain owners who’s domains are approaching their annual renewal date. They post out a professional looking letter/invoice notifying you that your domain is due to expire in a few months and to avail of their special pricing , you can send them a cheque on the provided prepaid envelope. The letter is worded to frighten non savvy domain owners into thinking that they could lose their domain unless they hand over money immediately.
If you receive letters like this in the post , and your still unsure wether its relevant to your domain name then call us to confirm. It takes 2 minutes . If you have paid them, cancel your cheque ASAP with your bank. We are an Irish company based in Ireland and all our customers domain names are renewed through Myhost.ie , nobody else should be contacting you about domain renewals.
Is my domain safe even though I have paid them?
Well your domain will not be renewed for 12 months if you have paid them so its not safe from expiring . But they cannot take your domain. To transfer a domain name , they need to obtain the domains EPP or Authorisation Key , the domain needs to be unlocked with the current registrar and the domain holder needs to approve the transfer process.
Can I protect Myself from these types of scams?
Yes, you can hide your Whois information which is visible to anyone on the internet by purchasing additional security for your domain (ID Protect) . Please contact us on 061 749922 or email sales@myhost.ie for more information.
We wanted to make you aware of some of the new features available to you from your Billing Control Panel located at http://www.mybilling.ie
1. Domain Availability Checker
It is now possible to search and register new domains from your MyBilling control panel. Once you login to your billing account, simply click on the Domain Availability Checker link from the left hand menu and you can buy domains directly from the control panel.
2. Bulk Domain Search
The bulk real-time domain name search allows you to search up to 20 domains at once. Simply enter your chosen domain names in the search window, one on each line (without the http://www.), click the LOOKUP button and if the domains are available you will be presented with an option to purchase. This option is also available on the main site http://www.myhost.ie/domains/bulk-register/
3. Ordering
You can now order new products and services such as Virtual Servers or Shared Hosting Accounts directly from your MyBilling account. Just click on the Order menu link and you will be taken directly into our ordering wizard.
If you have any comments, questions or feedback please let us know.
Customers please be advised of this SCAM. An american company calling themselves the Domain Registry of America are scanning Registrars for domain renewals and contacting unsuspecting customers looking for immediate payment for domain renewals.
DO NOT PAY THIS COMPANY anything, it is a scam . They are scammers and they have been around for years ripping off people.
If you recieve a letter from these scammers , please throw it in the bin. It is the only deserving place for this type of trash.
This information was received from the IEDR today. If you receive any contact from this company in the form of a letter or FAX please discard of it. Read below for more information.
It has once again come to the attention of the IEDR that a company operating under the name “Internet Register Ireland” is contacting businesses with registered .ie domain names by post and by fax, soliciting domain holders to register their domain name with the “Internet Register Ireland”. The “Internet Register Ireland” will request you to fill out their form and return it to them signed. It should be noted that they charge an excessive fee of approx €958 for the registration of your domain name in their database. The “Internet Register Ireland†previously operated the same practice in Ireland in late November 2006 and have been operating similar schemes throughout Europe and Canada throughout the past year.
We would like to reassure all of our customers that no such organisation has been authorised to act on behalf of the IEDR. If you are contacted in this manner we would recommend that you disregard this letter and advise anyone you know who owns a domain name of this activity.
Whatever your interest in web sites, this is news:
GODADDY.COM REACHES AGREEMENT TO HELP REGISTERFLY CUSTOMERS
The short version: RegisterFly got into difficulties and were stripped of their registrar status by ICANN. ICANN has been hoping to get someone to ‘adopt’ all of the domain names (and their customers) which RegisterFly has under their banner so that no-one would lose any domain names. It seems that GoDaddy has stepped up and taken that challenge by accepting 850,000 domain names.
This is good news for RegisterFly customers who were facing the potentially nightmarish situation of losing their domain names and being able to do nothing about it.
You can bet that GoDaddy are going to make some marketing capital out of this though 
GoDaddy are, by all accounts, the largest domain registrar on the planet (on the basis of domains registered, I believe) and adding over three quarters of a million domain names is going to boost that position somewhat.
What I find most amusing is that I cannot find a single reference to any of this on the RegisterFly web site. Quite the contrary, their web site implies a perfectly working, healthy business (though it stops short of claiming ICANN accreditation, which it no longer has). Witness if you will, and chuckle if your sense of humour is like mine, this quote from their company information page:
We are not…a “here today gone tomorrow” business…
Quoting from the ever informative N3Lite newsletter, we find it our unpleasant duty to bring this warning to current registrants of .ie domain names:
We have been informed by our friends at the .ie Domain Registry (IEDR) of a slightly unusual scam which registrants of .ie need to be aware of. A German-based company calling itself the “Internet Register Ireland†is contacting registrants by post and fax, encouraging them to register their domain on their database for a fee of €958.
This company is not authorised to act on behalf of the IEDR and those who have been approached by Internet Register Ireland are advised to ignore them.
(You can find IEDR‘s statement regarding this scam here.)
These kinds of scams are, sadly, all too common. If you are in any doubt about the legitimacy of any correspondance you receive, please check with your ISP.
eNom has bought one of its largest competitors, BulkRegister, to become the second largest registrar behind only GoDaddy.
While this is clearly good news for eNom and BulkRegister, why should you care? Well, MyHost registers domain names through the eNom backend system so you can be (even more) sure of great service, great prices and great stability for your domain names.
Looks like EURid have been listening.
According to Netcraft, EURid has suspended 74,000 .eu domain names and sued 400 registrars for breach of contract. (Here’s the official announcement.)
Frankly, I hope the perpetrators (should they prove to be guilty) get stung, heavily. I have a strong dislike for criminal behaviour of any sort, and this kind of mass exploitation is ridiculous and needs to be punished.
On a more practical note, if anyone failed to register a .eu domain name in the initial rush, I’d check whether those domains are part of the 74,000 suspended names. The process might take a while but there’s a reasonable chance that a good portion of those 74,000 are going to become available at some stage and you’ll probably never get an opportunity like this again.
The latest edition of N3Lite, the domain name ‘newsletter’ from NetNames, is out.
A lot of it is very factual, intended for internet professionals (and therefore ends up being a bit ‘dry’) but its extremely informative for anyone who has an interest in the inner workings and machinations of the planet’s various domain name registrars and controllers.
For instance, following my previous post about the apparent dodginess of many .eu domain name registrations, N3Lite reveals EURid (the .eu registry) is going to investigate 40,000 domains as, if the registrant isn’t based in Europe as has been claimed, the registrations will be invalid.
N3Lite is available as a web site and an emailed newsletter and there’s an archive if you want to read some old issues.
Frankly I’m a little disappointed that it isn’t available as an RSS feed since so much of my information comes through feeds these days. Perhaps I’ll drop them an email and suggest it
Has anyone else noticed that the new TLD (technically a ccTLD but that’s another blog post right there) .eu hasn’t really come to anything?
Despite a lot of fuss made at the time of its public launch, I personally haven’t seen anyone using any .eu domains yet. (And yes, I do live & work in Europe.)
OK, so actually I know of 3 domains that actually resolve to a site – www.eurid.eu (that of the .eu registrar), www.europa.eu (the web site of the European Union who until that point had used the equally unfamiliar www.eu.int) and www.register.eu (which appears to be a fairly uninteresting domain registration service). The first two of those I found from a Google search and the third from a Google advert so they’re hardly in mass circulation.
What I find odd is that, at the time of writing, there is supposedly nearly 2 million .eu domains registered. But I can only find 3 that work?
I know there was some fuss made at the time that .eu became publicly available, that suggested that everything wasn’t totally above board. Now I’m really starting to believe it. And from the evidence of the one .eu domain that I tried and failed to register (that now resolves to an advertising filled landing page), and the things I’ve mentioned above, I have to ask the question: how many of those 2 million .eu domain names ended up in the hands of Europeans who actually wanted to use them?