One year ago I bought few domains with ipower because nice price and free whois privacy, however now...

Dear ....

Your "...." domain name has a September renewal date
and is enrolled in our domain privacy service, which protects
your identity by keeping your contact information from being
published online.

To ensure that .... remains protected, we will
automatically initiate a one-year renewal of the domain privacy
service on September 27. We will charge $8.99 to the credit card
we have on file for your account to renew this annual
subscription.


Nice, a? :rolleyes:

Phoenix, Ariz. (November 30, 2005) -- IPOWERWEB, Inc., (www.ipower.com) a leading Website hosting provider for small businesses, has announced the launch of its new, FREE WHOIS domain name privacy program for customers. While other companies charge $8 to $15 for this service, IPOWERWEB offers domain name privacy protection free to all of its customers.



source: http://www.ipowerweb.com/pressroom/42.html

I don't have a problem with them changing to a fee-based service; however, automatically charging the credit card on file for a service not previously incurring a fee is wrong.

Well, to be honest, there's option to sent them ticket with request to cancel private whois. If you do this in 4 days or so from recieving this mail notification you don't get charged.

Hi testnick, I had already noticed this thread but I forgot to inform you about my "story", which is related to yours but to me it went even worse because I didn't receive the e-mail informing me of the additional fee required and so they charged my credit card automatically without asking anything.
You can see the thread here (on this same forum): showthread.php?t=726435

Here is the another link:-

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=5340726

I don't have a problem with them changing to a fee-based service; however, automatically charging the credit card on file for a service not previously incurring a fee is wrong.

It seems like they did what's right and notified their customers instead of just charging them for it. It sucks that they're charging for this service now, but at least it wasn't a surprise.

I'm curious to know how much warning the user received prior to the automated renewal, though. The post was made 5 days prior to the automatic renewal date which sounds like enough to me. It was probably even sent earlier, though.

In my opinion this method is wrong in any case.

Because in the end registering a domain is just a "contract" with whom you're buying the domain from and if you want to change something in a "contract" you should ask for confirmation by the other part, especially if the change will mean to pay a more than doubled fee compared to the stipulated original.

Even telecommunications/telephone companies (which in my opinion are probably one of the most dishonest in business) calls you with the excuse of a "new, exciting feature! speak 10000 hours! totally free" etc. so that they can record your consent for the new service and then charge you for that "free" service.

Sending you an e-mail to inform you that you have to reply to cancel something they already approved in place of you is not right from my point of view, especially sending it only one time and with only five days' notice. Because a list of things could happen, for instance not receiving the e-mail as I did (as I told in my thread), or what if you were on vacation? Or the HD had burnt and you were one week without computer?

If you plan on doing something like this, i.e. doubling the price of a service, you have to plan it ahead of time and be sure the people involved in the change actually know about it.

This at least is what I believe is doing honest business. Maybe I'm too naive and that's why I'm broke I fear.