Administrivia: domain transfer from eNom to NearlyFreeSpeech.net

[Ryan Tucker]

Greetings...

TL;DR: Nothing is changing, except we're saving $35/year.

The rocwiki.org domain is due for its annual renewal.  Domain registration is a commodity service where domain registrants (e.g. RocWiki) pay domain registrars (e.g. eNom) to make a domain name (e.g. rocwiki.org) exist within a domain registry (e.g. Public Interest Registry, aka PIR).  Really, it's all a racket, but that's neither here nor there.  The long and the short of it is that we pay an annual fee for "rocwiki.org" to continue being the address of RocWiki.

The folks at eNomCentral have provided the essential "registrar" service for many years, coordinating the movement of money from the RocWiki General Fund to PIR.  Here is the offer they had for us today:

1) Domain Renewal: $39.95/year (plus $8/mo for the privacy option)

2) Free trial of an unrelated service I'm never going to use(*)

(*) If the free trial of the service that will never be used is not cancelled prior to the end of the free trial, the credit card on file will be charged $14.95/mo.

It is worth noting that, of that $39.95, PIR (arguably the only entity actually doing anything in this racket) receives $7.70.  F*** that.

So, be advised that the rocwiki.org domain is being transferred to a different registrar, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.  They charge $9.49/year, plus $0.01/day for the whois privacy option, which obfuscates my name, physical address, phone number, etc in the public 'whois' database.  I've worked with them for many years now, and have found them to not be scumbags.  (That's high praise in this industry.)

There will be no change to how anything operates, nor will there be downtime or anything like that.  Like one would expect from any good racket, this is entirely a paperwork change, far removed from the technical operations of the domain.  eNomCentral doesn't provide any other services for RocWiki: DNS and server hosting continue to be provided by Linode, and our SSL certificate is signed by COMODO on behalf of Namecheap.

Let me know if there are any questions, etc.  Thanks!  -rt

--
Ryan Tucker <rtu...@gmail.com>