Network Solutions is now apparently resorting to rather questionable marketing tactics to be able to continue to charge the excessive $35/year for .com registrations while stellar competition (such as GoDaddy) offers the same for $9.99/year and you get better customer service and easier to use management interface.
There are many snazzy AJAX-based whois tools on the web, such as ajaxwhois.com. Some of them abuse the collected lookup information so that when a user finds a cool sounding domain name that is available but doesn’t register it right away, the owner of the whois-tool goes and registers the domain name and slaps a $5,000 sticker on it. Few people go for that, but what if the increased sticker was $35? This is what Network Solutions now does! If you look up a domain name at networksolutions.com, and it is currently free, the cost is $9.00/year. That’s ¢95 less for the first year than the same registration through, for example, GoDaddy. But if you don’t register the domain right away, let’s say you wait couple of hours, Network Solutions snaps it up, and the price suddenly increases to the NSI’s old $35/year (since now you don’t have the option to use a competing registrar). Lookup at, for example, GoDaddy tells that the domain name you looked up “is already taken”. Command line Whois, on the other hand, says:
Registrant:
This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com
13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
HERNDON, VA 20171
USDomain Name: THE-DOMAIN-I-LOOKED-UP-COUPLE-OF-HOURS-AGO.COM
————————————————————————
This Domain is Available – Register it Now!
600,000 domain names are registered daily! Don’t delay; there’s no guarantee
that a domain name you see today will still be here tomorrow!
Register it Now at www.NetworkSolutions.com.
————————————————————————Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Network Solutions, LLC domainsupport@networksolutions.com
13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
HERNDON, VA 20171
US
1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620Record expires on 14-Feb-2009.
Record created on 14-Feb-2008.
Database last updated on 14-Feb-2008 17:20:18 EST.Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.reserveddomainname.com 205.178.190.55
ns2.reserveddomainname.com 205.178.189.55
Swell, eh? When you don’t have what it takes to offer better service than the competition, then you use shady tactics to extract money from the unwilling clientele. NSI is a bit akin to SBC/AT&T in that both originate from the time when they had the monopoly in their respective business areas. Times change, but procedures and even more importantly the old corporate mind-set stick hard.
Today I registered two domain names through NSI at the elevated $35/year cost because the names were needed, and because my boss looked up their availability earlier today using Network Solutions homepage. I will be transferring the domains to GoDaddy shortly, and will from now on advice everyone stay away from NSI (well, I already have been doing so but this is yet another reason to continue do so).
). But in the end it was Mea Culpa. In the Tek-Tips thread someone mentioned that the possible culprit could be a problem with a deterministic network driver. Hmm. To get some network application working on that computer I had disabled Kaspersky Internet Security firewall last night. It turns out that disabling the firewall disables DNS resolution on the computer (NSLOOKUP works because it talks to the name server directly). Shutting down KIS entirely didn’t make a difference, but once I re-enabled the firewall, things returned back to normal. I suppose had I uninstalled KIS it would have no longer interfered with the name resolution like it did when it was simply turned off.