Please tell me that none of you have actually paid this to be a reseller

[durangod]

http://www.enom.com/resellers/benefits-pricingplans.aspx

 

 

So to sell their stuff you have to pay them.... maybe im dreaming but that should be the other way around!

 

Please tell me that none of you have been suckered into paying that. Their TLDs must be sprinkled with pixie dust and gold flakes and have special selling powers.. Oh i see for that price the Enom TLD fairy is going to put a spell on my site visitors and get them to thurst for a registration TLD fix... And while they are at it they will go ahead and pay the 10 years up front... ahhhh makes sense now..

 

Yes yes i know we all must pay something, i have opensrs... but its a huge difference between $100 and what Enom is asking. So are they trying to say there .com or their .whatever is 15x better than opensrs or any others... i think not...

 

Plus i have already made my investment back from opensrs with special promotions and sales.

Edited September 4, 2014 by durangod

[Damo]

You do know about the free enom account available right?

 

https://www.whmcs.com/partners/enom/

[durangod]

Well i guess not... lol ill check it out, thanks so much for the link... and the head up

[durangod]

OK my feet taste nasty lol...

[brian!]

although I think technically it's not a free account directly with Enom, you'd just be a sub-reseller using WHMCS's account.

 

You would have a sub-account beneath us which enables you to benefit from the lower pricing we have negotiated with eNom thanks to the bulk buying power of all WHMCS users.

[openmind]

I've been with eNom for 10 years now and paid to be a platinum partner. The reasons?

 

1) Lowest tier pricing

2) Dedicated account manager who I'm on first name terms with

3) Exclusive promos

4) Heads up on forthcoming changes

 

Considering it's a one-off fee it's paid for itself many times over. As a professional business I have no objections in paying for a quality service as it reflects what I in turn provide.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

although I think technically it's not a free account directly with Enom, you'd just be a sub-reseller using WHMCS's account.

You also have to rely on whmcs passing on promotions plus no dedicated account manager.

 

You get what you pay for.

[Troy]

I've been with eNom for 10 years now and paid to be a platinum partner.

 

Same here, except we're now ditching Enom for their extremely poor business practices.

[durangod]

Same here, except we're now ditching Enom for their extremely poor business practices.

 

Care to elaborate on such things ?

[Si]

Let me add mine in the meantime:

 

charging for whois id protection - others don't

charging an admin fee ? for paying money into your own account with them

not the lowest prices - I had 2000 domains with them and have transferred them all away to another registrar over the past 2 years. How? By setting all of my customers domains to renew by 2 years, but renewing them by 1 year with enom and transferring them to the new registrar using the additional years fee. It's meant every domain renewal has had to be done manually for 2 years, but I'm near the end of that now and saving around $2 per year per domain (and making 100% on whois id protection on those customers that order it), AND not having to pay the admin fee to pay money into my enom account. Almost free of them now......AND IT'S WORTH IT!

[durangod]

I have only had one experience with them and that was a client that it took me over a month to xfer their domain to me because greengeeks and Enom kept passing the buck and blaming each other that they never got the request. Sad that a process that should only take a few min to finalize took us over a month. So im not sure who was at fault, but the only reason

i am considering this is because it would be nice to have access to the names that opensrs might not have.

 

Im not talking about ever giving enom my base core .com, .org, .net, or any of that. Just getting a list of domains that are not available from one source and getting those from another in order to have those available for clients if they want them.

 

I just tried to use their new tld addon that comes with WHMCS and i guess since we dont have an actual account with them i guess you cant use it because it kept coming back no such user. So i guess we are just limited to using what we can from the WHMCS buddy system account...

[Troy]

Care to elaborate on such things ?

 

1. $250 redemption fee.

 

2. If you don't get the redemption fee paid on time, they'll send the domain to their subsidiary AcquireThisName.com and then charge you thousands to get it back. (We had a client allow their domain to lapse, and promised to send the redemption fee by check. We had the domain ready to redeem in our shopping cart at Enom, but the client didn't get the check to us in time so Enom sent it off to AcquireThisName.com and they wanted $2500 for it at that point, 10x the redemption fee.) The same people that own Enom own AcquireThisName.com.

 

3. We had another client with a Christian children's ministry domain iskids.org. They accidentally let the domain expire, and Enom redirected it to a PORN links page with a squatting woman from behind, in nothing but a G-String. This was Enom's parking page they use when they *think* the expired domain is somehow porn related. How on earth they found a porn relation in "iskids" is beyond me. All of this client's site visitors got an eyeful when they attempt to reach the ministry website. Extremely shameful on Enom's part, yet they wouldn't do anything about it or admit to any impropriety.

[durangod]

And there is no way we can go right directly with ICANN is there? Are we forced to go thru one of these vendors?

[Troy]

You can become an accredited registrar, but it takes some real volume for that to be worth it, plus you have to have some decent capital in reserve to qualify, and you need a registrar platform to actually perform the registrations, which is another big expense. ResellerClub/DirectI sells their platform as a service to accredited registrars for example such as resell.biz and netearthone.com.

 

You need to have a LOT of domains registered, or have a LOT of investment capital and plans to register a lot of domains for it to be worthwhile. Otherwise like most of us you're using a registrar reseller account.

[Damo]

Troy although I wouldn't be happy either with a links page, in any form, for a domain I own the client has to take responsibility for letting their domain registration lapse.

 

Domain registrations are basically a lease of the name. You never actually own the domain. There are plenty of opportunities to renew in advance and renew for extended periods of time.

 

The conditions are very clear as to what happens when a domain is left to expire, enters ERP and redemption.

 

If the domain was showing links then the organisation no longer had the rights to use the domain.

 

In fairness sending a cheque and relying on the postal service and banks to process something when it had already expired was poor judgement. An instant payment method (even with a prepaid card) would have ensured the domain was secured.

 

We use enom and have done for near 14 years. It's all about knowing the terms and conditions of the provider you choose to use.

[Troy]

Yes Damo you are correct. For the domain the client accidentally let lapse and was showing a porn landing page, definitely the client was at fault for letting the domain lapse. I don't think it's necessarily his fault that his children's charity domain was redirected to a porn landing page though. The standard landing page would have been okay, but Enom had no business deciding that was a porn related domain unless maybe they're a bunch of - Removed - (could be!) And certainly the other client who failed to redeem his domain--definitely his fault also, but Enom's tactic of letting their subsidiary AcquireThisName.com have it and then try to extort the registrant is also quite distasteful.

 

I've transferred thousands of domains out of Enom to ResellerClub as a result. Resellerclub is not perfect, but at least they aren't quite as shady with their practices. They did get bought out by EIG as we had most of our domains transferred, which really dismayed me, but I'm not going through the transfer process again unless they really start going downhill.

Edited September 6, 2014 by Infopro
Awful Name Calling Removed

[Damo]

I don't think it's necessarily his fault that his children's charity domain was redirected to a porn landing page though.

At that point it was not their domain. If they let it reach that stage their "ownership" of the domain was nulled.

 

I have seen links pages appear for expired domains that have pointed to competitors of the original domain registrant but once again at that stage they were no longer the registrant so the domain is available to anyone/everyone to do with it what they like.

 

I am glad for you that you made a decision to move your client domains to a better matched registrar to your own ethics and morals. I was disappointed to read that you took your argument to that of likening enom to potential - Removed -. That statement really shows a low level of professionalism on your part.

 

.

Edited September 6, 2014 by Infopro
Awful Name Calling Removed

[Infopro]

His statement, and your comment on it, modified. I can't let that fly here.

[Troy]

I'll grant you that wasn't my most professional comment ever.

 

Still I cannot imagine many people would find it cool that Enom purposefully chose to redirect a children's ministry domain name to a porn landing page. Yes the client was dumb to allow the domain to expire, no question there.

[Infopro]

I highly doubt ENOM redirected the domain name. I don't think your client was dumb either. Very very busy maybe. Domains don't just switch off or redirect the day they expire, as I'm sure you know.

 

That user has the same sort of options the rest of us has, renew it or lose it. They lost it, that's not ENOM's fault.

[Troy]

I highly doubt ENOM redirected the domain name.

 

What do you mean by this? Enom definitely redirected the domain upon expiration, as they do with all of them. I had a lengthy ticket discussion with them about it and they acknowledged redirecting the domain to their (Enom's) porn landing page. This is done by keywords in the domain, per Enom themselves. The domain was still in the renewal grace period. And yes, Enom domains most certainly *do* get redirected pretty much as soon as they expire without renewal, with dns propagation time of course.

 

Further, Enom would not provide any sort of way for our domains to not ever get redirected to their porn landing page. So, we moved to another registrar.

 

Why does everyone keep arguing a point that I have never made? I've never said the domain shouldn't have been redirected. It was *where* it was redirected that I, and the client, found objectionable. We lost the client over it in fact. Neither the client nor I had a problem understanding that the domain had failed to be renewed and as such was repointed to a landing page. The destination page itself was the problem--first time any of our expired domains had ever been pointed directly to porn *by the registrar*.

 

Still don't believe that Enom did the pointing to their own porn landing page? I'd be happy to show you the ticket.

 

Here are a couple quotes from Enom directly from the ticket for good measure:

 

I certainly understand your concern with this. I find it hard to believe that our system would pick up a keyword in the domain name that would trigger that parking page. The issue is that we have no control over this. I must say that this seems to be an isolated incident as I have NEVER seen this before. I cannot guarantee that it won't happen again, but generally speaking our system will only put that page up if there is foul language or sexual reference in the domain itself. I certainly do apologize for any trouble or inconvenience this may have caused you.

 

In response to my request for a setting that would prevent this from happening again:

 

There is no way that we can guarantee this for you. The system is keyword driven and when a domain expires, it is universally categorized. There is no way to engineer this specifically for your account.

 

and

 

Unfortunately with our terms and conditions, we can point domains anywhere once they are expired. I agree that this page is certainly not correct one for this domain, but there is nothing that we can do.

 

At any rate this was just a few bullet points in response to the question of what shady Enom business practices I had problems with. It wasn't meant to hijack the thread and devolve into an infinite loop of argumentation over a point that wasn't even contested.

Edited September 6, 2014 by Troy

[easyhosting]

 

Further, Enom would not provide any sort of way for our domains to not ever get redirected to their porn landing page. So, we moved to another registrar.

 

 

It was not your domain at that point, even in the grace period it is not your domain as it was not renewed. the grace period is just that 'a small period where a registrar will give you some grace to renew a domain' even though they don't need too as the domain is not yours anymore.

 

so if its not yours why should they let you redirect it to a different landing page

[Troy]

What I asked Enom for was a setting that a reseller could use to specify that when domain's in his account expire they don't get redirected to a porn landing page by Enom--not that they wouldn't get redirected at all, but that we could at least trust that our clients domains wouldn't be pointing to porn 24-72 hours after expiration (we don't register porn domains so it shouldn't have happened to begin with). They wouldn't do it, which was perfectly within their rights, so I moved to a new registrar. Pretty simple, huh?.

 

If enom wanted to, for the sake of keeping my business and that of others who feel similarly, they most certainly could implement a preference for resellers to not have expired domain's point to porn. They don't *have* to do it, (and they didn't), but then neither do I *have* to continue doing business with them, (and I'm not.) See how simple that is?

 

Again, why does it matter? Someone in this thread asked me to detail what I considered shady business practices by Enom, and I did. I still fail to understand why everyone needs to argue these points ad nauseum. I stated what I considered to be shady, and what I did about it, plain and simple.

Edited September 8, 2014 by Troy

[blakeh]

Without getting into the war of who's at fault for enom's expired domain redirection scripts, I'd like to chime in.

 

I've had an enom account under another reseller for about 10 years and finally with about 900 domains think it's time to pay the fee to go platinum. With other people in this thread saying it's not worth it and there are better registrars, who do you suggest? To me, Enom is the professional tool the big boys should use. I've never had an issue with them over the years, and when we don't want to pay the 'admin fee' (credit card fee really) we send them a check to prefill the account, simple thing.

 

If you're in this business to grow, you use the tools the pros use. I took a look at Reseller Club, and the lower fees were tempting, but the hokey looking interface and other items, it just feels like a step above godaddy, except that they have api options.

 

So are there other options besides Enom?

 

bh

[Si]

one word: namesilo.com

 

no whois id charges

no fee for paying money into your own account

lower prices than enom

 

Moved all my domains from enom over a 2-4 year period and happy in the extreme.

[blakeh]

Thank you for the suggestion, I had not heard of them. But the pricing seems about the same as enom's platinum level. I'm reading more about them though.