Yahoo! no longer the shizzle
July 30th, 2005So I have most of my domain names registered with Yahoo! (or whatever third party registrar they use) and up until recently I have been satisfied with the pricing, the easy to use domain control panels, etc. A few months back one of the domains I registered, remlyrics.com was up for renewal (although I didn’t realize this). Yahoo! took the liberty of re-registering the domain for me, a nice service that most users will appreciate.
Unfortunately I had previously decided NOT to renew the domain since I hadn’t really updated the site and I was hosting it on my singletracks.com hosting account which was skewing some of my webstats (not to mention hogging bandwidth I desperately needed). It was my bad for not realizing this would be auto-renewed (prolly in my user agreement somewhere) so I resolved to make sure I didn’t have the same problem next year.
The Yahoo! domain control panel actually has a nice little link to use for canceling your service for a particular domain. I clicked the link and found a form to send outlining my reason for canceling, etc. I filled out the form and wrote that I didn’t want to drop the domain immediately since I had just re-upped for another year. Instead I just wanted it to fall off once it was up for renewal since I didn’t need it anymore (slim chance that someone would read this but I figured it was worth a shot, I really wasn’t that concerned either way). Anyway, I submit the form and get a message: 406 Not Acceptable. I had never seen this error code before (perhaps Yahoo! invented this one?) but I guessed it was a glitch that would be fixed in a day or so.
I’ve gone back to the page several times and keep hitting the same response. It’s as if Yahoo! is saying to me in a computer-sounding voice: “SORRY, YOUR REQUEST IS UNACCEPTABLE. I MUST NOW TERMINATE YOU…” (not sure how to enunciate computer voice?). Anyway, it’s pretty convenient that the cancel service page isn’t working but the purchase additional domains form works just fine. The real thing that makes me mad is that there is no form or contact email on the site to report problems like this (again, very convenient for the yahoos). I did find a phone number eventually but I don’t have the time nor the cell phone minutes right now to wait on hold to cancel a single domain name renewal.
Anyway, back in the day Yahoo! used to be the heat but clearly they’ve become overly focused on the bottom line, so much so that they make it nearly impossible to cancel a $10 a year service. Troubling…
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:34 am
[...] experience any worse, somehow they find a way to sink to a new low. Back in 2005 I wrote about my difficulty canceling Yahoo! services (the ‘cancel’ form was mysteriously broken for months) and more recently about my [...]