Recently I got a message that one of my
other websites which happens to be hosted by Wordpress was going to
expire in 1 month. It was for a site that is not too active and I was
debating on whether or not to renew it for another year. The cost to
renew is $26 which is pretty high compared to Blogger which only
charges about $10 per year.
I noticed that Wordpress charges
separately for privacy protection. This basically means when you
register your website, your personal information such as name,
address, phone number, and email will be kept private and they will
display their contact information instead. With Wordpress, they
charge $8 for the privacy protection.
Since the renewal was coming up, I was
testing out some of the settings and disabled the privacy protection
to see what would happen. Upon a search, I noticed that it did in
fact publish my personal information for the domain ownership. So I
decided to re-enable the privacy protection for the remainder of the
term. The only problem is, they do not allow you to re-enable it
without paying the $8 again for a new year.
Of course I was not happy about this,
basically having to pay another $8 for something that was already
supposed to be in place. I paid the charge and the privacy was
restored. I contacted Wordpress by email to see if they could refund
the charge because the privacy should have been covered through the
end of the year. I expected a reply saying something like
unfortunately the only way to re-enable it is to pay the $8 again for
the year, but to my surprise, they actually refunded the charge!
Thumbs up for good customer service!
I started thinking, why is it the case
where people's personal information is available upon a search if
they register a domain name? This seems like a breach of privacy. I
guess it depends on which service you register your domain name with
and if you decide to enable the privacy protection feature. It seems
like if this is an option, it should be standard for all domain
registrations.
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