VeriSign’s SiteFinder
I’m appauled by this new tactic by VeriSign to sign up new customers. Now when you try to access an unregistered domain name, you don’t get an error message. Rather, you get redirected to VeriSign’s domain registration page. Doug Bowman pointed this out today and is also very pissed off about SiteFinder. I totally agree with him that this is a ploy to take total control of future domain name registrations.
Casual surfers that wish to register a domain may not know that there are other alternatives, like my current favorite, Hostway. The funny thing is that VeriSign’s competitors often charge less than a fourth of the price that VeriSign does for the very same service.
Thankfully, ISPs are reacting to this move by VeriSign and are blocking the request redirects to the SiteFinder page by banning SiteFinder’s IP address. Within a few days, there should be no more SiteFinder and the web should go back to normal. However, this kind of behavior should not be tolerated from VeriSign.
2 comments
This draws the line. I will no longer use Verisign to host any of our domains. I’ve had it with this company. Hijacking typos. What else are they going to do?!!?!?!
Yep I host all of my domains with Hostway. Screw VeriSign.