I was on the road today heading to a meeting and while traveling I decided to break out my Zune and get caught up on some of my Web Hosting Show podcasts that I have been running behind on.  I was listening in on one where Mitch was telling about the new thing that Network Solutions is doing, it made me so mad I almost drove off the road.  I knew this was going on but never really thought about it I guess, once it sunk in I decided I would come home and blog about it…

Did you know that if you go to Network Solutions website and check for a domain names availability and do not purchase the name that they (Network Solutions) will automatically hold the name back and make it unavailable for a period of time.  This means if you go to Network Solutions and look for the name, netsolidiots.com, and it is available and you do not purchase it at the time that you won’t be able to go to another registrar like Register.com or Enom and pick up the name because Network Solutions already has a hold on it?  I think that they can only hold onto the name for a period of 5 days or so but my gosh, being able to do that just doesn’t make sense to me.  Why hasn’t ICAAN stepped in and put a stop to this?  I am not for sure what the technical term for this is but for the sake of this blog post I am going to call it “desperation”.

Why do I call this practice on the part of Network Solutions desperation?  Simple, they have been losing the domain registrar battle for a long time now.  At one time back in the day Netsol used to be the only game in town, at least that’s the only alternative I had when I purchased my first domain name back in the 90’s.  A little while later a few other names showed up on the scene who offered up some real competition like Register.com and Enom.  Nowadays, Enom and Register are still out there doing their thing, and doing it well I might add, but Netsol has been reduced to only a small market share.  I admit, I don’t follow the registrar wars nearly as closely as I probably should, my partner Stephen handles all of our domain registrations for Pleth.  GoDaddy is also a mogul nowadays that I would be stupid not to mention, they are probably one of the largest now, if not the king outright, when it comes to domain registrars.

For years I have dreaded dealing with Network Solutions when we would pick up a client that had their domain with them because it has always been such a chore to transfer their domains out to our registrar for management.  I am not alone in feeling this way either, most webmasters and hosting firms that manage domain names for their clients all hate Network Solutions, or at least all of the ones that I have spoken with.  It’s sad when a hosting company or web developer has to form a strong opinion like that about a registrar, it’s just not necessary.  At the end of the day, they simply hold the domain name, how hard should it be to keep everyone happy?

I have probably went on about this long enough, it’s just a bad business practice I wanted to draw attention to, and one that I can’t imagine is still allowed, again, where is ICAAN in all of this?? 

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