Sponsor's Message

Some companies still do this but, as I discovered this weekend, others seem to have dropped the ball very badly.

First-up there's the way Domainz seem intent in confusing their existing and would-be customers. (I'll talk about the others I uncovered tomorrow)

I notice that Domainz has given its site a facelift (yawn). Gone is the gaudy green, replaced with a dull grey, just like this site ;-)

I only noticed this because I was lured to their site by a spam (sorry, a marketing email) that I received as a Domainz customer.

Now regular readers know that, thanks to Telecom's crappy lines only offering me 20Kbps on a dial-up line, I tend to surf with images and javascript disabled so the first thing I noticed was that I can't use the Domainz website.

The idea of providing simple, static links at the bottom of pages for those of us who can't or don't want to use fancy drop-down menus has eluded Domainz. Hell, even the Site Map won't work without Javascript enabled! But these are minor gripes and most people won't notice or care about it.

What is of concern however is the atrocious wording associated with an explanation of Domainz Web and Email Services.

The web packages talk about a traffic allocation which varies from 512Mb to 2Gb. Note that if we're going to be pedantic -- Mb/Gb is the abbreviation for mega-BITs and giga-BITs not mega/giga-bytes. But more significantly, is that a weekly, monthly or annual traffic allowance? Who knows?

Well I do -- but only because I rang them to ask. Turns out that it's an annual figure -- but since most other hosting companies tend to quote traffic on a monthly basis, some customers could end up paying the $50+GST monthly "Traffic Overuse" fee mentioned on this page.

When I inquired, I was told that this was a flat fee that was levied regardless of exactly how much extra traffic you'd racked up.

Yes, that's right folks, if you've got a really heavily trafficked website such as Aardvark (70GB last month) then Domainz could be a really cheap option, costing you just $337 per year plus a monthly "Traffic Overuse" fee of $56.25 per month plus GST.

Now you and I know that there's no way they're going to honour these figures if you roll up with a site that generates huge amounts of traffic -- so why on earth are they not making that clear? Even the Terms of Service page merely says: "Each Hosted Website will have a monthly traffic limit determined by the package the customer has selected. If this limit is exceeded in any calendar month, the Hosted Website will be suspended until additional charges for the additional data traffic are paid". Given that the fee is clearly listed as $50+GST per month, I think there's a huge potential for the company to take a hit there.

However, the worst piece of disinformation being propagated by Domainz was the email they sent me last week which was either so carefully (or badly) worded that it had me thinking for a moment that I was going to be billed an extra $5+GST by Domainz because I was using 2Day.com's nameservers but had registered my domain through Domainz. This email told me that to avoid this charge I should contact Domainz and organise to use their namesevers -- carefully omitting the fact that the Domainz charges $55+GST whereas 2Day (and others) have much lower fees.

Tsk, tsk -- is Domainz becoming just like one of those Aussie crowds perhaps?

Or could it be something even more sinister?

According to the Domainz staff member I spoke with, all of these poorly conceived and deceptive elements of their website and spam were produced "in-house".

Now it's worth remembering that Domainz is for sale and one of the options mooted is for staff to make their own buy-out offer. What better way to put off other would-be external buyers than to present a decidedly unprofessional impression through bad marketing and sales material perhaps?

Or should we should apply a slightly modified version of Hanlon's Razor and say that "one should never attribute to cunning, what could be ignorance."

Or maybe it's just that they've hired Xtra's old tea-lady and gave her the role of "Marketing Manager" -- you never know in this game.

If any Aardvark readers have an opinion on today's column or want to add something you're also invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

Contacting Aardvark
As always, readers are invited to submit their comments on material covered in this column. If you'd like your comments published here then please be sure to use this form and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!