Life is grand

Seems like I am unfortunately in the middle of a tug of war between eNom and RegisterFly.

For the past few years I have used RegisterFly and it was fine. Not great but then I didn’t have many domain demands and RegisterFly did the job.

It turns out though that RegisterFly didn’t actually do the registering. They passed it on to eNom. So if you do a whois on one of my domains it says that eNom is the registrar.

Who cares, right?

Well eNom are now severing their relationship with RegisterFly and so the domains I normally manage through RegisterFly won’t be available as they are actually registered by eNom.

RegisterFly sent me an email saying if I pay for the transfer from eNom to RegisterFly then I get $7.99 from them which I can use next year when domain renewals are up.

Frankly I don’t want to pay any money for my domains right now, they were renewed recently and I paid for them then. I am a bit angry RegisterFly took that money but actually were using eNom and so now I have to pay RegisterFly more money. I don’t care that they are giving me a free year (from next year only), that isn’t the point. RegisterFly should absorb the cost now and transfer my domain from eNom. Instead they are trying to get $5.99 out of me.

So I think I’ll just ditch RegisterFly and go with eNom who it turns out are the second biggest domain registrar around.

The mobile TLD is launching today; dotMobi. The BBC has a decent article on it. Firstly I find it ironic that the domain designed for limited input devices (like mobile phones) is four letters long; .mobi.

Is this going to work though? Or do we even need it? The way I see it we should enter in a domain regardless of the device and get back data tailored to the device. So if I view cnn.com on my desktop I get a nice multimedia, multi-megabyte download. If I hit it on my phone I should get a lightweight package with navigation designed for phone keypads. I shouldn’t have to use different domains.

One good thing about dotMobi is the set of rules dotMobi sites have to adhere to. They emphasise content and small downloads with good access strategies for phone keypads. But really those rules should be applied to all mobile sites irregardless of what domain is being used.