Hi Dreamhost Folks,
Long-time customer here. I have quite a number of domains attached to my account, and I get SO much email about auto-renewal – all through the year various groups of domains are “about to auto-renew” and then they “are auto-renewing”, etc. And I feel like I have to “check them just in case” because I don’t know what the “failed-to-autorenew” email looks like (subject line might not be any different), etc, and I can’t afford to have something go wrong with my domain registrations.
Problems:
#1 - What I * really * want to do is renew each domain for 5 years or 10 years and then forget about it for a LONG time. But the auto-renew is only for 1 year, and even if I go manually I only get 2 years maximum.
#2 – And when I try to manually renew them (for 2 years, to at least stave off the madness), then it makes me do every domain one-at-a-time instead of just adding them all into a cart and doing ONE transaction.
#3 – And then, to make matters worse, if I start renewing them one-by-one, it loses track of what my total is and starts claiming I have a credit balance (go try to renew several domains on the same account, one at a time, and as soon as you get to the second or third you will see exactly what I mean)
So the improvements I would like to suggest are:
- Please let me renew domains for longer than 1-2 years. Preferably 10, but at least 5 years at a time. (cuts down the number of times I have to worry about this)
- Please let me have “auto-renew” set for the maximum renewal period, rather than only for 1 year. (also cuts down the number of times I have to worry about this).
- Please fix the manual renew process so that I can renew all of my sites in a single transaction
- Please fix the balance thing so that it doesn’t lose track of my balance when I do more than one transaction in a row.
- Please change the subject line of the emails to be more concise and useful:
- Present bad subject line: “[robrey4 234522243] tayreynolds.com: Domain Renewal Notice”
- BETTER subject line “tayreynolds.com: Domain Auto Renews on 10/24/2020. [robrey4 234522243]” – move the (useless-to-me) account information to the end of the subject line (because that’s the part most likely to be clipped off when looking at a list of emails, so you have to get the important part said first not leave it until the end), put the important part first, and be more informative in the subject line.
- Present bad subject line: “[robrey4 234522243] tayreynolds.xxx: Domain Name Renewal Receipt”
- BETTER subject line “RENEWED: tayreynolds.xxx Domain Name. Receipt attached. [robrey4 234522243]” – moves the key information to the beginning where it won’t get cut off in a list of emails, and makes the success of the renewal more clear.
Thanks for having a read.