Late Charge Fee for Domain Renewal

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  lewishamguitarlessons · Member · Apr 13, 2015 at 9:42 am

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  As a customer of yours with multiple wordpress sites for my music school business I am extremely disappointed at being charged £60 as a late payment renewal. I also have sites from you hosted by another company which charges me £90 a month for the privilege of a wordpress site! In total I have 8 different sites. many have domain forwarding payments. I have always promoted the idea of wordpress to friends and colleagues as a great platform. Surely the fact I upgraded late is of no consequence to your company whatsoever as it is my loss to have not been visible online for that period. The fact that was unable to upgrade because I was travelling in a foreign country offering my services free of charge to so many worthwhile causes makes me very cynical of large organisations. The overbearing capitalist mindset of such companies performs spectacularly as a giant plug hole for all goodness in the world. I would either like a personally written and well crafted reply or a refund of such a preposterous ‘late charge fee’
  Mr Cockle

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Apr 13, 2015 at 10:59 am

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  Hi there.

  I am extremely disappointed at being charged £60 as a late payment renewal.

  I can understand your frustration, but that fee isn’t imposed by WordPress.com. The redemption fee is imposed by their domain registrar, and this is standard practice for most domain registrars. See: https://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/domain-expiration/#redemption-period

  I also have sites from you hosted by another company which charges me £90 a month for the privilege of a wordpress site!

  If a site is hosted by another company then WordPress.com isn’t making any money out of it as you are paying that company to host the free WordPress.org software for you. You’re paying that company for a domain, server space and bandwidth, not for using the WordPress software.

  WordPress.com and WordPress.org are completely separate and different. http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

  I’m also tagging this for staff to follow up. Please subscribe to the thread so you are notified when they respond and be patient while waiting.

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  siobhyb · Member · Apr 16, 2015 at 2:23 pm

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  Hi there.

  I can confirm @kokkieh’s statement that the late renewal fee is one that’s imposed by our registrar, not WordPress.com. Charging a fee for late renewal is standard amongst most domain registrars and is not something that WordPress.com has control over.

  We do take measures in the hope of preventing this sort of thing happening: We enable auto-renew by default on domains, send out email notifications, and put an expiration overlay on sites with recently expired domains. In addition, we are always on the lookout for new ways to grab a user’s attention before a domain enters redemption. If there’s any way you think WordPress.com could have stopped this from happening to you then please do let me know. I’d be more than willing to pass suggestions along.