I was just checking email, and one came through from Globat. I had registered a domain with a registrar that's affiliated with them or whatever a little while ago. I received an email from them that was just promotional in nature - "We're offering some discount package on hosting... blah, blah, blah." When something like that comes in, I just delete it, b/c I host everything elsewhere. Well I received another email from them today about the same promotion for hosting. And it said they were automatically going to upgrade me to this hosting account and charge my credit card if I didn't click the opt out link (it wasn't spam, and went to a legitimate page)? How on earth do they get away with doing that? I'd be pretty ticked off if I deleted it as promotional garbage, as I'm sure a lot of people do. I don't have a hosting account with them for them to "upgrade" in the first place -just a domain registered (unless it came with free hosting space that I just never used and don't know about). I've never heard of a company saying "You're going to buy this from us, and we're going to automatically charge you." They're supposed to convince you to want to buy from them; not tell you that you're buying from them unless you click the magic link. Some companies just drive me nuts, but that might be one of the worst customer service issues I've had crop up with a registrar / host, and I've had some pretty big issues with a few of them. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it some new bs they're pulling, or have they always been like that? It's just bad enough that I have to deal with registrars and hosts constantly sending emails with new promotions that I need to scrap, but now I actually have to read through them all just to make sure they're not going to hijack my credit card? Just nuts.
yeah i know. i have like 7 or 8 or even more domains hosted with them, and they sent me those emails for each and every domain name. even last year when one of my domains were to expire, they just charged me without even sending a notification that my domain will expire soon, or they didnt even notify me that they were gonna charge my card for the renewal of my domain name. they just did it. well anywho, i got my money back and told them that they shouldn't be charging cards without the cardholders permission.
I can understand an automatic domain renewal on one level - most registrars will do that or let you choose to do it manually- but automatically upgrading what someone orders??? How can that even be legal??
i dont even like the automatic renewals. i mean last week i even had to call them to see what active domains i have with them, and tell them to not renew them when they expire. and i was on hold for about 8 minutes. im looking into another domain registrar.
Even though I can't stand GoDaddy as a company, this is one of the reasons why I still use them for most of my registrations even if not hosting. I can set them all to manual renewals, and they send me a ridiculous amount of renewal reminders via email and in the mail, so I won't forget. Most of the others I used set you to automatic renewals, and either don't give you a choice, or only let you choose when they invoice you for the renewal.
They didn't actually get to the point of billing me, b/c luckily I didn't delete the email as just more promotional junk. I don't have the patience to deal with them on it right now since they didn't touch my card. If it happens again though, I certainly will. There's absolutely not way it's right for them to do that (whether it's technically legal or not, that's pretty terrible customer relations).
Its definitely not legal. Any company that operates like that would have absolutely no trust from me, meaning I'd transfer out all my domains immediately, because you never know what other crap they'll pull later and it's just not worth the hassle. I'd at least send them an email telling them that that type of thing is not only illegal, but rather unprofessional and if they continue to do things like that, you'll go elsewhere. Maybe they'll get the hint.
I'm just wondering if they've got it hidden deep in their terms or something. The thing is that I didn't ever actually do business directly through their site, so it's even weirder seeing things come through from them about hosting. They probably just own the other site I ordered from or something. No clue.