My really horrible domain registrar

My really horrible domain registrar

If you've had domains registered for long enough, you probably did business with Network Solutions. If you were relatively lazy about transferring those domains away as competitors rose up, you might even still have a few with them. That's been my situation for the past couple of years.

I went to run some renewals lately and ran into a whole bunch of really obvious scumbag behavior. After being surprised by their crazy prices, I decided to turn off auto-renew. Yeah, well, guess what, you can't do that online. Oh no. Look at this.

Nope, you have to pick up the phone and deal with a phone monkey. Guess what, I've been a phone monkey. I don't want to have one of them click something I should be able to click myself. This is clearly a scummy way to try to lock people in. I've decided to "reward" them by removing all of my business from their clutches.

So here's another scummy thing I noticed. I logged in and was greeted with this horrible thing front and center:

You'd think this would mean that one of my domains no longer has its "private registration info" thing set. Well, that's not the case. Actually clicking on it gives a popup which gives their "hard sell", and then at the bottom says "all of your domain names are now protected".

Yes, they are so stupid, they actually do the try-to-scare-you-into-buying thing to people who already have everything they are trying to sell!

The final insult is that there is no way to remove my credit card info online in order to keep them from trying to "be helpful". It looks like I'd have to plug in a bogus number (which still validates) instead, and I'm sure that's some kind of crime, so I won't be doing that.

Soon. I will be free of them soon. I stayed there far too long.