Another day, another letter from “Domain Renewal Group” sent to our house, warning that one of my domain names (my main work one) will expire on April 10th 2010.   Apart from the fact that it’s a wee bit early to renew (I’d prefer to keep my cash in the bank as long as possible, TYVM), they charge an outrageous £20 for a single year.  One & One charge me £8.99, so we’re looking at a 122% increase, yet they don’t host the web site or email, they just redirect these to ones I supply myself.

A pretty poor offer, yet their modus operandi seems to be:

• Do a whois lookup for the billing contact for a domain that will expire in the next N months (N seems to be getting larger)
• Send a letter on good quality paper to this address, vague enough to confuse a non-technical person.
• Take their ridiculous cut for not doing very much.
• Profit!

There’s more information over here about their dodgy practices. People are even implying that they won’t provide the basic service they claim, but I can’t comment on that since I’ll never use their service.

Parasites.