What can I do? help Please
 

I was wondering if anybody can please tell me what my next step should be.

I sent my host the money to renew 2 of my domains back in Jan.
One of my main ones and the other was just a domain for doorway pages that did have some old sites on it that weren't being updated. I only noticed that my big one went down and they told me that one didn't get renewed, so they gave me 1 free months hosting. It wasn't until the other day I went to go to the other domain that I noticed it wasn't my stuff on the page so I did a whois on the domain and it wasn't registared to me anymore.
I have the reciept of payment for the both domains to be registared and one didn't get registared and now somwone else bought it.
I called my host and they said it was a problem on my end but I was talking to the guy in accounting on friday and he said yes that they had got the money and he went back and looked at it and don't know why they didn't get renewed and he would check into it, after the weekend of not hearing from them I called tonight and was talking to the owner and he told me it was my mistake even though this has happend twice before but caught the other times. He offered me $15 for the fuckup. But I lost a good domain that was getting a lot of SE traffic and was making me money.
Can anybody give me advice on what I should do and do I have any legal rights?

Thanks in advance
Smurfette

you got no rights... the only thing you can get is chargebacks. thats it! nobody is responsible for anything....

smurfette, will u marry me?

There is more than likely nothing you can do... I lost one because of Network Solutions, we paid all the money to get it taken care of, sent them all signed legal documents, have records of this and when I would call them they would give me some song and dance, we went thru this for like 4 or 5 months and it ended up expiring and someone else picked it up, my ONLY recourse I was told was to try and buy it from the person who got it. I approached him and he wanted $500 for it... SCREW that. But I would almost say you have a similar situation here.

This is why I always try and encourage people to register them themselves....... with us, I get the renewal notices and when I try and reach the people who own the domains to see if they want to renew these domains, the emails bounce or they never contact me about them. There is little we can do when we are not able to reach the people who own the domains to see if they want them renewed.

I am not saying the latter is what happened with your case because I don't know, but I see this happening alot, it's why I always say we have to have a valid email addy so we can reach our clients.

Did the cheque clear before the domain expired?

If so they were negligent and you can nail them for loss.

yes the cheque did clear because I got a hold of them and they gave me a month free hosting for the screw up of one domain. I had thought both domains were registered and only found out the other day when I went to upload a dooway page that it was gone. I sent the money in Jan and it didn't expire till the middle of Feb. Which gave them a month to renew it. And they didn't:(
Smurfette

True but very hard to prove. First you have to prove you actually made money with the domain, and if its not a substantial amount your just wasting your time and money with lawyers to recover your losses and thats only if you win. If you dont win your now out even more then you are now.. Its all sad, but true.

True...what are we talking here in terms of amounts?

The main lesson to be learned is never trust anyone else with anything valuable. Manage your own domains.

www.ICANN.com and www.internic.com and raise Cain on their complaint pages. If your host isn't an actual registrar, find out who they register thru and go email them this.

You can't get the site back but you can certainly make it uncomfortable for the host. We heard you can't get a thing done about that stuff but when we complained to ICANN they went after the registrar that was giving us fits and the problem was resolved.

If that domain was making $$ then you tell the host you expect to recoup those losses for at least a years worth and expect freehosting for the same time for your other sites.

BUT make sure you have the p's and q's right... check etc dated before the site expired and all of that stuff.

EXACTLY...... and sometimes THAT doesn't even work....... make damn sure you have a regisrar you can trust as well. But I ALWAYS manage my own......