A certain Telecoms company and Domain Renewals

I have had an issue today where a domain has expired despite the fact it was supposed to auto-renew – this means our exchange server has gone down which is a real pain. I spoke to the technical team at the company concerned – and by the way, the technical support at this company is pretty good compared to any other company in the same sector – and they informed me that there may have been a billing problem which prevented the auto renewal – fair enough. I was also told that an email would have been sent to the administrative contact for the domain flagging up this issue – of course I had already done a whois lookup for the domain, so I pointed out that his company were listed as the administrative contact – this being the case, he agreed that they would have received the email alerted them that they had a problem processing the renewal – but nothing was done about it!!

It always frustrates me that the larger the company, the less personal support you get – its sort of understandable in a way, when you think this company probably have hundreds of thousands of domains registered on behalf of their customers. But if a small company can provide a certain level of support to its customer base, shouldn’t a larger company be able to provide the same level of support to a larger customer base?

My opinion is that as company’s get larger, they don’t seem to increase there infrastructure proportionately – instead the percentage running cost seems to gradually get low and the pockets of the big guys gradually get bigger!!