Be careful of cheap online web design companies that offer "free domians".

If you are dealing with an ethical web design company, and you prefer to have them manage your domain that’s fine. But be careful of shady companies that offer cheap web design and a “free domain”. When the time comes to move on to a different company you may find your domain is being held hostage.

Recently a company contacted me to build a new website for them. They had originally used a cheap web design company and quickly found that customer service was nonexistent. The website had multiple grammatical errors, wrong information, the wrong logo was even used. After calling and emailing for months the customer got little to no response and nothing on the site was ever fixed.

Finally in frustration the customer decided they had to move on to another company to get the website they wanted but soon found out it wasn’t going to be so easy to get their domain name.

This is the email we received when we requested a domain transfer:

"Dear All,

We provided him domain free of cost. The value of the domain in today's date is $285. We are going to sell the domain for no less than $300 ass the traffic to the domain and value of it is pretty good. . Please let us know if you interested.

call on the number below.

regards,
Jack
Tel No : 1703-349-7835
Email id : This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

So this is how companies like North American Web LLC do business. Offer inferior products, poor customer service, then rape the customer when they want their domain name. Note how no last names are used and they only have gmail addresses.

These people where almost impossible to get a hold of – and finally after the customer paid the extortion money they agreed to transfer the domain. It took them over a month to release the domain name – and even then they switched it to the wrong GoDaddy account so we had to wait another 2 weeks to even get access to the domain so we could change DNS.

The moral of the story is that it pays to do a little research and make sure you hire a company you can trust, never just go with the cheapest option. It doesn’t matter if it’s a web designer, a plumber, or a carpet cleaner. Hiring the right compnay will save you money and headaches down the road.