A MarkMonitor Alternative For The Portfolio That Does Not Need Enforcing

Anything that will hold a domain name for you, or take responsibility for the date it expires. That covers a great deal of ground. A retail registrar is one answer, an enterprise brand protection firm is another, and a managed service is a third. They are not competing on the same axis. The question worth asking is which failure you are insuring against.

They are built for a legal department and we are built for whoever ends up holding the domain login. MarkMonitor watches for people registering names that imitate yours and can go and take those names back. We do not do that. What we do is hold a small portfolio, own every expiry date in it, and publish the fee for doing so. If your names are being targeted, that difference favors them.

Almost certainly, but we cannot prove it and neither can you until you ask them. There is no published rate to compare against anywhere on their site. That absence is the honest answer to the question, and it is why this page argues about fit rather than about money.

You should, and it is the first thing we set. Automatic renewal handles the common case and prevents more losses than any reminder email ever has. What it does not handle is the card that expired, the notification address belonging to somebody who left, the registry that changed its price, or the name that should not be renewed at all. Automatic renewal is a floor, not a plan.

Often not, and month one is a far better time to establish that than month twelve. If you hold two names, both in one account, both on a card that works and both renewing automatically, the honest answer is to stay where you are. This starts being worth paying for once the count climbs, the cards multiply, or nobody can list what you own from memory.

Not necessarily, and this is a harder question than it is with a retail registrar. Where an enterprise agreement is already in force, the sensible order is to read what it says about termination and transfer before anything moves. If their service fits what you actually need, the honest recommendation is to stay, and we will give it.

No, and this is worth stating carefully, because a badly handled transfer is one of the few ways a working domain stops working. Nameservers stay where they are until a change is planned. Transfers happen one name at a time, never in a batch, and never on a name inside sixty days of registration or of a previous transfer, because the registry refuses those anyway.

Then that comes first and everything else waits. A name still inside its grace period is usually recoverable at the ordinary renewal price. Past that it enters redemption, where the registry adds a fee that dwarfs the renewal, and past that it is gone to whoever wants it. We find out which of those three you are in before anything else gets discussed.

You do. Registrations are held with your organization as the registrant, not ours. This is the same answer MarkMonitor gives and it should be the answer any registrar gives. We hold names on Cloudflare Registrar under an account that names you, and nothing about the arrangement requires you to ask our permission to use your own property.

One thing at one rate, with no ladder behind it. Every name you hold is inventoried, dated and monitored. Renewals get actioned. Contact records get checked. Transfers in and out are handled for you. Registry cost is passed through at cost, and two dollars a month per name is the whole of what we add. Three fifty if DNS comes with it.

No, and treat anybody who does with suspicion. Registries change rules, cards get declined at the moment of renewal, and a registrar can suspend an account for reasons nobody explains for two weeks. What we commit to is that a person sees every expiry date before it arrives and chases whatever is standing in front of it.

Every name we hold for you, its expiry date, what renewed since the last report and at what cost, what falls due in the next ninety days, and anything we think you should drop. The last of those is the section clients actually read. It is also the one no registrar has any reason to produce.

The audit is the difference and it lands in the first two weeks. Most businesses discover two or three names they had forgotten, at least one contact record pointing at somebody who left, and occasionally a domain already sitting in grace. None of that requires twelve months to become visible.

You give notice and nothing is stranded. The names were always registered to you. We unlock them, supply the authorization codes and transfer them wherever you want them, including back to MarkMonitor. A service that makes leaving awkward is telling you something about its confidence in the rest of the offer.

Registry cost passed through at cost, a flat monthly fee per name listed on the service page, and the dates watched by somebody who is paid to watch them. The registrations stay in your name whatever happens between us, and there is no larger package above this one where the real work lives.