Fwiw if you want a no nonsense registrar I would transfer the domain to Amazon Route 53's registrar service. They became a registrar last year I think. Probably not the cheapest pricing but a very simple to the point system. They'll autorenew and your domain fees will be bundled with your AWS fees plus you can then protect your domain management with their consoles multi factor auth feature.
I've moved all the mission critical domains I manage to them and I suspect we'll end up doing that across our company in the next year or two.
Thanks, I was looking at that, actually.
The reason for my anger at Bob's company had to do with a forwarded email I received from a client this morning. I am the Admin, Billing, and Technical contact for this client, and his three domains are on my account. This is because he's forgotten to renew them some years, and paid scam artists money to "renew" them in the alternate years; so either way, the sites have been down a few times for non-renewal of the registration.
I finally put the domains on my account to make sure they got renewed, but kept the client in WHOIS as the registrant. So Bob sent me the 90-day renewal and CC'd the client on it. The problem is that the email contained notices for those domains as well as nine others coming due on my account. Worse yet, it contained a link to a list of ALL my domains that are registered at Bob's outfit.
I was pretty much flabbergasted that they would do something like that. So I called them, and they told me "that's how the mail system is set up" and that there's nothing they could do about it other than to change all the registrants for domains that I manage, but don't own, to myself.
I refuse to do that because I consider it unethical. It would make the clients and their domains hostage to me. I know guys who do that and I detest the practice. But as long as I keep the clients down as registrants, they get a copy of whatever mail Bob sends me when their domains happen to be coming up for renewal, including whatever other domains are coming due, along with a link to my entire domain portfolio.
It's not that I have any secrets in there. I just consider the practice irresponsible. And then there's Bob's annoying habit of requiring me to decline a bazillion other services that his company provides every time I register a domain, but that's another story.
The only thing I do like about Bob is that he lets me pay by PayPal. I don't like anyone storing my credit card numbers if I can possibly avoid it. I've had to get my cards replaced too many times already because of that. I got caught up in the Adobe hack, the Target hack, the FoodTown hack, and the Home Depot hack. It's getting pretty damn tiresome.
Amazon already has one of my cards on file, however, so it would be no additional risk. Or I could just get their own card and use it only for Amazon, which is something I probably should do anyway. It minimizes the inconvenience should Amazon get hacked.
I do like AWS S3, though. It's probably the best place to stash server backups that I've ever come across. It's cheap, trouble-free, and about as secure as it gets. I'm pretty sure it was you who suggested them a few months ago, so thanks for that.
Rich
