Ask HN: My domain registrar (Hover) rug-pulled me for $3000

sshrinks99 about 3 hours ago 53 comments

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

I registered the domain onlyfans.sexy ~6 years ago as a gag where I'd post pictures of fans (everything on the site and in this post is SFW). This year I got an email stating that, like all prior years, the domain would auto-renew at $38 in seven days and didn't think anything of the next two emails also notifying me that the domain would auto-renew.

It would seem that I very much SHOULD have paid attention to those next two emails, because in both the three and one day renewal emails the price changed from $38 to $3000. Needless to say, I was surprised when I was billed $3k USD (plus tax).

After contacting Hover's customer support, they told me that there was nothing that they could do about this and they have a no refund policy because "Hover does not have the ability to override or reverse pricing set by the registry. Premium domain pricing, including renewal costs, is determined by the registry, and they may adjust those prices over time. Once a renewal has been processed, we are charged that fee immediately by the registry, and those charges are non-refundable to us."

So according to Hover, the .sexy registry (Uniregistry) sets prices as it sees fit, decided to jack up the renewal cost at the last minute because they can, and there's simply nothing they or I can do about it. Has anyone here experienced anything similar?

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Discussion (53 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

joshstrange•about 2 hours ago

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.

tommy_axle•about 1 hour ago

Although the timing was suspicious it looks like they might be correct about the price. namecheap has the same price https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma... (a bit cheaper at porkbun around $2.5K)

gruez•about 2 hours ago

>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.

If what hover said is true (ie. "the .sexy registry (Uniregistry) sets prices as it sees fit, decided to jack up the renewal cost at the last minute because they can"), trying to transfer to another registar won't fix the issue, because they'll just charge the same price.

ktm5j•about 1 hour ago

It will fix the problem of having paid $3000. Just want to add that while Hover might not be at fault, I don't think OP is either. I would have done the same thing (read the first renewal email and ignored the rest). I think Hover should change something, like adding PRICE CHANGE to the email headline or something similar.

joshstrange•about 2 hours ago

True, but you can abandon that domain (OP already said it was mostly a joke website) and transfer all the ones you do care about. If this .sexy domain is their only domain there then it's even easier, just chargeback and be done with it.

tossandthrow•about 1 hour ago

Charge backs are generally not for returns.

If the charge was legal and within contract and customer regulations, then Hover might very well just challange the charge back.

behringer•about 2 hours ago

Make sure you get all your domains out before the charge back is filed.

joshstrange•about 2 hours ago

Yes, you are burning your bridges with a chargeback which is why you should threaten it to support first and only after they say no do you transfer all your domains, wait a few days, then file the chargeback. You somewhere between 60-90 days to issue a chargeback so OP has plenty of time.

shrinks99•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, I already transferred everything else to Cloudflare in advance of this so that part should be taken care of.

thataccount•about 2 hours ago

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.

shrinks99•about 2 hours ago

Heh yeah, I've recently had another site succumb to the same thing (that domain wasn't managed by me). I've long accepted that domains are kind of a racket, but haven't actually been on the losing end of the money until now!

dlcarrier•39 minutes ago

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.

anigbrowl•about 1 hour ago

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.

dividedcomet•about 2 hours ago

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 for

t0bia_s•about 1 hour ago

There are recently a many arguments to leave platforms like social medias or blog sites like substack and have own site to have control over your content.

However, technically, registrars are gatekeepers - you just rent domain for yearly fee. And they can change price policy any time. Or do wherever political tendencies says.

sva_•about 1 hour ago

It should be illegal for the registry to add a domain that has already been 'sold' to their premium tier. Imagine you build anything successful under a domain name and the registry can just legally blackmail you into paying a horrendous amounts of money to keep your domain?

wjnc•about 3 hours ago

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.)

fckgw•about 1 hour ago

What does .xyz TLD have to do with this? The TLD is .sexy

wjnc•21 minutes ago

You're right. Those are 2999.99 according to their site. According to the Wayback Machine they've been priced that way since at least 2024 [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240111120913/https://www.hover...

8organicbits•about 1 hour ago

> It’s Hovers problem what the price behind the door is.

This feels key to me. If .sexy is changing fees with very short notice, and Hover doesn't have enough time to inform their customers before renewal, then Hover should stop offering .sexy domain names. None of that is a problem for the customer.

james_pm•about 1 hour ago

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.

shrinks99•29 minutes ago

For anyone reading the thread, they did do this! Had a nice call with James too, which I appreciate.

It looks like the situation is actually more complex and interesting than "The registry rug-pulled me". My .sexy domain price was increased by the owners of .sexy (to $3000) since I bought it 6 years ago BUT was in Hover's system where it was supposed to retain the legacy price of $38. Something went wrong between Hover and the registry where the legacy price wasn't honoured and as such, it bumped to $3000 on renewal. Apparently support really flubbed this one and we both agreed that going the "post on HN" route for customer service isn't exactly a win on their part.

The money has been refunded and I've been assured they're looking into the bug. Will probably do a follow up blog post!

tomcam•about 1 hour ago

Bigger picture: don’t use someone else’s trademark for a domain anyway

rglullis•about 3 hours ago

Doesn't seem to be an issue with Hover, here.

ontoillogical•about 3 hours ago

I believe this is extremely unexpected behavior for an "auto-renew" feature. If I'm told that I will be autorenwing something in 7 days and am told about a price, that price changing within those 7 days feels like something the consumer should be protected against!

rglullis•about 2 hours ago

How?! Hover is just a proxy between the customer and the real TLD owner. It could very well be that the TLD system saw that the domain was about to expire and decided to jack up the price then.

Maybe Hover could've bought the domain themselves when close to the expiration date to secure the lower price, but then if the customer decides to let the domain go it would be they holding out the bag.

inerte•about 2 hours ago

Let's say you grab a can of Coke in the grocery store, shelf sticker says 49c. When you pass on the cash register, it clearly shows $5k in the cashier's monitor, and the point of sales screen, so you're charged $5k.

Ooops, says the grocery store: Coca-cola raised the prices, not me.

dghlsakjg•about 2 hours ago

The issue isn't that the price changed. The issue is that they auto charged after the price was quoted lower. If the registrar had said, "hey the price just got jacked way up, do you still want to buy this?" There would be no issue.

But because they said the price was x and not 100x, but then charged 100x, there is a real problem.

gnopgnip•about 2 hours ago

The registrar is not "just a proxy". They are the merchant of record, they bear the financial and legal responsibility.

ajb•about 2 hours ago

There can be a difference between whose the fault is, and who is accountable. Usually, the entity you paid is the one legally accountable to you. This is not just a trivial detail: you will have no luck with the law attempting to hold the other entity to account, even if they are at fault; while you can hold your counterparty to account even if their action was dictated by someone else; they have to act correctly with you- it's not your problem if their relationship with some other company is put into contention. This may not apply to domains, FWIW. usually, buying a domain means you have a contract with the registry too. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

This can big companies too, FWIW. Cisco were in violation of the GPL over the WRT54G, which resulted eventually in the release of OpwnWRT. Well, Cisco weren't the entity which actually caused that fault; the chip vendor was, as they were the ones who used the linux kernel without releasing the source. That is not a valid reason to violate a licence.

ofjcihen•about 2 hours ago

Sounds more like the risk is on Hover then and not on the customer. If you advertise 38 dollars to me for a product you source from someone else and that the producer suddenly charges 100x the price you can’t just charge me that price because “that’s the price”.

You’re making money as a middleman, you accept the risk of a middleman.

driverdan•about 1 hour ago

It is. If the price suddenly goes up that much they need to be sending very clear warning emails about the price increase, with the subject clearly saying so. Something like "Alert: Upcoming Domain Renewal Price Increased to $3000"

shrinks99•about 3 hours ago

Arguably yeah! The issue I have seems to mostly be with Uniregistry (aside from the fact that Hover takes a cut of the transaction).

...But I'm also not a Uniregistry customer, I'm a Hover customer. Do I have any recourse with the TLD owner?

kotaKat•about 2 hours ago

Not really, I'm afraid! All these sketchy TLDs have been playing the "premium domain" rugpull for quite a while now. The gag is you'll get a really cheap first year intro offer on the domain, then they'll spin around in a year once you're footed knowing you have no choice but to grin and bear the price.