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- Hacker News
- Doesn't seem to be an issue with Hover, here.by rglullis
- Register a complaint with the creditcard company with proof of last years $38, the auto renew message with price of $38 and the amount they put on your card. Pretty clear and cut? You can’t offer X and then take Y. It’s Hovers problem what the price behind the door is.
Did you read the ToS? The ToS states they renew at prices mentioned on the website. I can find .xyz to renew at $19.99. Now get your screenshots and get your money back. (I’ll correct myself transparantly: this is not very clear from the ToS. Prices are in USD and from time to time they can limit the number of domains at that price. That says little about the price at renewal.)
by wjnc - The price change on the registry happened a few years ago, so in that sense Hover is powerless. But when they sent you the renewal notice (and indeed at the time of the price change), they should have sent you a clear warning that the price was going to increase by ~10,000%. istm you have a basis for the chargeback if they indeed offered to renew it at $38 and you thought nothing was amiss; presumably you wouldn't have bothered to renew if you knew in advance.by anigbrowl
- As others said I think a chargeback is the way to go. I had a much smaller scale version of this happen where hover wanted to change $70 to renew a domain that Cloudflare would charge $30 forby dividedcomet
- You are paying for a domain on a gTLD, which is owned by an organization that can charge whatever it wants, and thousands to tens of thousands a year isn't uncommon. Your registrar is only charging tens of dollars a year for their services and they aren't involved in the price hike.
ICANN started selling gTLDs in 2012 and they are not cheap, costing hundreds of thousands to procure, plus tens to hundreds of thousands a year to maintain, which is why prices for domains on that gTLD are usually pricey, too.
There's probably not much you can do, as you need to dispute with the owner of the gTLD, not the registrar, but in the future I recommend switching to either a traditional TLD (e.g. .com, .org, .net, etc.) for the lowest price or a country code (e.g. .io .tv .gg, etc.) which is usually pricier than a traditional TLD but much cheaper than a gTLD.
by dlcarrier - Had a thing with Hostgator once where they wouldn't accept any proof of who I was other than an expired credit card that had long since stopped being used. The site went up for sale, and someone bought it and had it up for resale for around $5,000. Turned me even sourer on the domain system of the normal net.by thataccount
- Thankfully a chargeback is possible here. While a chargeback is almost always "possible" it can be dangerous if the company you are charging-back is the only provider of a service. I'd be wary about doing a chargeback on the Google/Amazon's of the world but Hover? There are many other registrars out there if you are willing to transfer and for $3K I'd be transfering my domains and then filing a chargeback.
BUT, before you do that, threaten a chargeback. That might unstick their support or get your case bumped up the chain. If they still refuse then transfer and chargeback.
by joshstrange - I work at Tucows Domains/Hover and we're digging in on what happened here. I've reached out to the OP already via email. tl;dr our support team didn't handle this well at all and we've already issued a full refund.
We are still looking into where the price mismatch found its way into the picture, but that domain is a tiered price domain but it is also "legacy" priced meaning it should renew at something very close to the standard price for a renewal but didn't.
by james_pm