Ok, I registered hollowmyth.com a few years ago. I had great plans. I had a vision. I was finally going to have a place to let my creativity run wild…
Well, my spare time didn’t match up with my ideas and it lay fallow with only a lowly splash page to mark its existence. Well, this year, I decided to take up the charge and try it again. I was on fire! I wasn’t going to let anything stop me! Except the “server not found” error when I typed in the URL.
“What?!” I cried. How could it have expired? I had it set to auto-renew. Well, after chasing down the registrars info and loggin in, I found all the alerts were sent to an old email address. The domain was circling the drain, about to be flushed into the waiting hands of the highest bidder.
Ok, fine, I accept I lost it due to user error. So, how much will it be get my domain back? $80 bucks! $80 bucks for 10 letters. $80 bucks for 10 imaginary letters made up of a few bits of information sitting in a database somewhere. “If you’d renewed it within 12 days, it would have been fine,” the service rep tries to help.
So why does it cost so much? “Well, we get charged for blah and blah and blah so we feel the need to bend over our customers just like we get it from verisign and ICANN,” I can almost hear him shrug. “That’s business.”
So, I’m forced to either purchase a less optimal domain, pony up the dough for the renewal, or sign up to watch for it when it gets put on auction.
I know it’s a weak rant, given the state of the world, but c’mon…it’s just 10 measly letters…