Anyway, I really don’t understand why you would have to pay the domain pirates anything, this type of thing used to happen in the past but it doesn’t happen any more because virtually every registrar has policies in place to prevent re-registration within a certain time-frame after expiration. For example here is Verio’s page regarding their policy :
http://www.verio.com/support/documents/view_article.cfm?doc_id=3675
It seems to me that you shouldn’t have had to pay anybody that re-registered the domain after expiration, it shouldn’t even have been possible according to Verio’s “Redemption Period” policy. Time to bring out the lawyers!
I hear you about the renewals, we have changed our domain renewal policy after
this fiasco. Ultimately if Verio failed to execute the auto renewal, then by rights
they should have given us a grace period in which we could have taken care of
the renewal but they never did.
I was chatting Daera yesterday who was kind enough to give Verio an anonymous call
and asked about their redemption and renewals policy and the guy’s answer was so
vague it bordered on laughable. My IT guys are still waiting for a straight answer
from them but we doubt that we will ever get a straight answer about what happened.
It is so easy for them not to take responsibility for what happened, let alone for
them not giving us the chance to renew after the auto renew fell through.