Shortly after competition for domain names was opened up, I switched all my domain names from Network Solutions to Dostster. At the time, Dotster had good word-of-mouth and positive reviews. Unfortunately, the company has really gone down hill the last couple years.
Recently it pulled off two bone-headed maneuvers.
First, it automatically created free .info domains for its users. For example, since I own LeftWatch.com, Dotster automatically gave me LeftWatch.info. But I don’t want LeftWatch.info . . . ever. All they did was clutter up my account management screen with a bunch of domain names I have no intention of ever using. Dotster does have an e-mail address to send correspondence to get rid of the .info domain names, but I just can’t take the chance of having them accidentally delete the .com address while they’re at it, so I’ll just stick it out for a year.
But it gets worse. Seth Dillingham notes that Dotster committed a major privacy faux paus in its consolidated domain name report,
Unfortunately, the email’s recipient list also included anybody else who was listed as the owner or administrative contact of any of the domains mentioned in the newsletter. My company provides full domain hosting services. Think about that.
I’m lucky that I am the sole contact on my (or Macrobyte’s) domains, and only a few clients have listed me as the admin contact on their domains. Still, those clients now have a list of most of my Dotster-registered domains, and now they all know about each other. (Good thing none of my clients are direct competitors…)
What will they try next, to top this hit? Maybe they’ll send everybody’s auto-renewal credit card info to everybody else, or do a courtesy mailing to their entire customer base with everybody’s passwords. Yeah, that would be cool.
Got that . . . if I had Seth listed as the admin contact, I’d now know about all of the Dotster-registered domains on which he is listed as an admin. Ugh.
Probably time to switch to another registrar.