Have you ever gotten a legitimate-looking email or letter from a domain registry company warning you that your domain is about to expire? Some may even include an invoice for renewal like the one you see here. In most cases, these emails and letters are scams.

If you registered your domain yourself through a company like GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Register.com, etc., then you should already know what company should be contacting you, and roughly when your domain will be expiring. If you are allowing us at Byte to maintain your domain registry for you, then you should NEVER respond to an email or letter notifying you that it's time to renew your domain from any other company. The only domain registry communication you should respond to will be from us.

Don't feel bad if you've fallen for one of these scams before — very many people have. The correspondence they send looks quite authentic and can be extremely confusing to the average consumer.

One of the most common culprits in this scam is a company named "Domain Registry of America." The Federal Trade Commission has already barred this Canadian company from their fraudulent practices in 2003, but to this day, consumers are still receiving correspondence from them in slightly altered formats.

Another common scam is correspondence letting you know that someone is about to snatch up a similar domain to yours, maybe widgets.net instead of your domain widgets.com, and that this company intends to use the copycat domain name with a similar site to yours to lure your customers away from you. The company contacting you urges you to act on it quickly and 'click here' to secure that domain yourself before it's too late. Of course the 'click here' directs you right to their domain registry site that promises to secure the domain instantly for an exorbitant fee.

As a general rule, whether you registered your domain yourself, or you had us register it for you, let us help you if you receive any correspondence about your domain that's not from us. We can easily discern if that correspondence is legitimate or not, and possibly save you much money and grief.