Last week a cream envelope showed up in the mail, stamped OPEN IMMEDIATELY in red block letters. Inside was a notice telling me that marshlandsoftware.com was renewing soon, and that I could lock in a special introductory rate for five years if I acted now. All I had to do was fill out the enclosed form and mail back a check for around $250.

I run a tech concierge business. I know exactly how domain registration works, and I still read the thing twice, because whoever wrote it had done their homework. My real domain. My real expiration date. My real mailing address. It read like an invoice from my actual registrar.

It wasn't. The company is called Domain Name Services, a name carefully chosen to seem equally generic and official for non technical owners. If you've owned a domain for more than a year or two, you've probably gotten a letter from them or one of their cousins.

Is Domain Name Services a scam?

Here's the annoying part: I can't call this an outright scam. The Better Business Bureau gives Domain Name Services an F rating and has logged a pile of complaints describing it as a fake invoice scheme, but the underlying transaction is real. Send the check and they will register your domain. It will keep working. You get, technically, what the letter promises.

What the letter doesn't say plainly is that mailing it back doesn't renew your domain with your current registrar. It transfers the domain to Domain Name Services and locks you into their pricing for five years. Worded like a renewal notice, functions like a switch.

None of this is new, by the way. A company called Domain Registry of America ran the identical play in the early 2000s, until the FTC filed a complaint over it and got a consent order barring the misleading mailers. Domain Name Services is running the same script decades later, on paper, mailed to whoever's domain is about to expire.

How much should a domain renewal actually cost?

Run the math on that "special introductory rate" and it lands around $50 a year. For a domain and DNS hosting, nothing else. That's not a good price. I have not found a worse one currently on the market, and I'd guess the main reason this company can still charge it is that direct mail doesn't get comparison-shopped the way a web search does.

Here's what the identical service costs elsewhere, as of this writing:

  • AWS: about $15-16/year for the .com registration itself, plus roughly $6/year to host the DNS in Route 53.
  • Cloudflare: around $10 and change for the domain, passed through at cost, with DNS included for free.
  • Namecheap: roughly $9-10 for the first year, renewing around $14/year after that. DNS is included.
  • GoDaddy: as low as a penny to $5 for the first year if you're a new customer, then about $22/year on renewal. DNS is included there too.

Every one of those lands well under half of what's in that envelope, for the same domain doing the same job. GoDaddy and Namecheap are playing their own pricing game, just a legal one: cheap enough to get you in the door, then a quiet jump once you're not comparison-shopping anymore. Read your renewal notice before you click confirm. But even GoDaddy's renewal price, the highest of the four, is under half what Domain Name Services wants for one year, let alone five.

If you're weighing where to actually register something, our guide to TLDs covers how to pick an extension, and the free domain checker will tell you what's available for a name you're considering.

What should you do if you get one of these letters?

Don't call the number, and don't mail the check. Nothing about it changes your uptime or your domain name. It just changes who you're overpaying, and locks you into that for five years.

Most registrars, AWS and Cloudflare included, turn auto-renew on by default, so your domain almost certainly isn't at risk unless the card on file expired. Log into whichever account you originally registered through and confirm the renewal is set. If you genuinely don't remember who that is, a WHOIS lookup will tell you.

I've written before about mail that looked boring and official and turned out to be the exact thing worth a second look: the overpayment scam that almost cost me a new client. Same lesson here. And if you're still comparing hosts, the inflated five-year renewal in this letter is close cousin to the one I broke down in why web hosting gets so expensive — a different vendor, same trick.

Or stop thinking about it altogether

Registering your own domain and pointing the DNS at a host is not hard once you've done it, but it is one more account, one more renewal date, one more piece of mail to second-guess every year. If you'd rather hand that off, Marshland's hosting plans bundle the domain, DNS, and hosting together for $10/month. One bill, the domain stays registered in your name, and nobody in your mailbox gets to pretend they're your registrar.

Reach out if you want us to take that off your plate, or if a letter shows up that you just want a second opinion on before you throw it out.