Yahoo! Domain Names

[toef]

I just feel like venting here, so here it goes:

Years ago I used to make joke websites for lots of my friends, and over time ended up purchasing probably 5-6 domain names as jokes, through Yahoo! Domains (since they were only $5 or so at the time).

What's great is Yahoo! sets up an auto-renewal on your account, and for the time being I was fine with it, because I liked to keep the joke websites running, and for $25-30 a year, it wasn't bad.

A year or two later, they bumped their rates up to $10-15 per year, and I cancelled some of the less funny jokes, but still kept a couple of my main sites active.

Now skip ahead a year, and I see that they are raising their 1-year auto-renewal fee to $35, which is an insane increase, and a ridiculous fee for 1-year of a domain name.

So I went ahead and cancelled all my Yahoo! accounts a few months ago, even though I had anywhere from 2-4 months left on each of them.

Skip ahead to today, and when looking through one of my bank accounts that I don't use anymore (but never actually closed), I see that Yahoo! billed me the nice $35 for an auto-renewal on one of my sites.

Because I don't use that bank account anymore, it had no money in it, and I was hit with a $40 overdraft fee.

I would just bite the $75 of wasted money if I felt I was actually to blame, but:

a) I'm positive I cancelled all my Yahoo! domains months ago (and switched them to Go Daddy, or a cheaper host), and

b) Yahoo! never emailed me to alert me of any upcoming auto-renewals for any domain accounts. Had they emailed me a day before charging me, I could've noticed that for some reason one of the accounts wasn't cancelled, and could've cancelled it again.

I'm on the phone with them now, and because I happened to catch this fee only 2 days after it was posted to the account, maybe they'll give me a break, and refund the charge, and then my old bank said they'd cancel the overdraft charge.

Moral of the story: Don't support Yahoo! Even if they give me a refund, their absurd $35 fees for renewing websites is probably screwing over a lot of people who forgot they bought domains on Yahoo!, and also forgot that Yahoo! automatically renews the account every year... and apparently doesn't care to even remind you the renewal is coming up.