The Romanian authorities that are responsible for handling .ro domain names have no idea about how to do this, it’s a nightmare to buy and maintain a .ro domain name.

Romanian authority that is responsible for .ro domain registration (rotld.ro) will take away the domain from the owner if the owner ever tries to sell the domain name, this somehow means that once you buy it for $61.00 is not yours to sell it.
If ROTLD finds that you attempt to resell a .ro domain name then domain becomes locked for an undefined period, the domain is NOT available for others to register after this. Many domains are blocked like this and now unavailable for anyone to use them.

Since trying to reselling a domain name will cause you to lose the domain name I contacted the ROTLD and asked if .ro domains can be ‘parked’, every domain registrar knows what “domain parking” is, right ? WRONG !
I got a reply telling me to define the term of ‘parked domain’, ‘parking a domain’, I explained with samples of domains parked with sedo, sent them links, domain owner forwards domain to domain parking companies like sedo.com and the owner gets profit from the ads that are displayed on its domain name while with Sedo or other domain parking companies.
The Romanian domains authority replied and told me that:
“- Well, if ads show up on the domain name while hosted on some company then is means that the domain owner agrees with it”.
I understood that Romanian domain authorities have no idea about what domain parking is so I stopped trying to ask if is allowed or not to park .ro domains. However I will not be surprised if in a while my .ro domain[s] will get blocked because of some TOS violation.

Romanian authorities that register the .ro domains (rotld.ro) can and will take away your domain name if the names represents a company’s product, company name, etc without ever asking any questions. This isn’t the case with .com or other domain names, nissan.com for example is not owned by Nissan Motors.

When you want to change your DNS the changes are not made automatically. If for some reason you need to change your .ro domain name dns then you need to request this by a public form then wait for them to make changes manually, the is no cpanel where you see all your .ro domain names and be able to make changes. ROTLD Site looks like ‘94 web sites. 

When you order the domain name you cannot instantly register it by card, the only card option is that you manually complete a form and email a file to ROTLD employees, form will contain all your card and other financial data and you will be sending it by email to employees in a country with high levels of online fraud. Not to mention the professionalism of the employees that didn’t ever heard of “domain parking“.
Another option is that you pay by bank and in one week after you made a “request” the domain could be yours, except if someone from your ISP, BANK, PRINT CENTER, ROTLD employees, will want to register it before you do, because all these persons see what domain you are trying to get, anyone has 7 days to get it before you do.

The only good thing I see with .ro domain names is that the fee paid is one time fee, you do not pay the fee each eyar, you pay $61.00 only once and you could have it forever, or untill the law will change, or untill they say you wanted to sell it, or untill they find a company named like your domain.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.