I got a letter today from the European City Guide in Valencia asking me to confirm my company details for inclusion in their business listings CD-Rom. My bullshit-ometer is pretty good so I immediately decided I wanted no place in their business listings but I think it's worth flagging up in case you also hear from them.

The letter says "in order to positively represent your company and your city, we would be grateful if you would fill in and return this form... as soon as possible." Below that are spaces to fill in or confirm your company details.

But then down at the bottom, there's some text which states, in slightly more legalese text than the opening paragraph, that by filling in the details and returning it, you are actually committing yourself to paying €987 per annual listings, and it automatically renews.

Now, on the one hand, if you properly read the thing all the way through, you will understand what this is all about, but if you just go by the three quarters of the page that just give this impression you are just confirming your details not booking an advert, you may find yourself ordering something you didn't want.

Find out more about the European City Guide at this protest site and see what the Daily Mirror had to say about it. Apparently they are quite litigious, so all I will say is, I won't be bothering with it and I suggest you don't either.

I did decide to look at their website to see which of my local businesses had found themselves in this guide, and was pleased to see someone from Kent having inserted quite an amusing entry into the directory:

Company name: Tisacon
Address: Gullable House, Gravesend

I was looking for nice brandable domain names and of course, the .es TLD of Spain provides the opportunity to create some nice one word domains, separated only by a ".". I've not seen them much in the SERPs but I do like the aesthetics of creative domain registrations so picked out a name I wanted to register.

123-Reg had a fairly prominent notice on its site saying that they now register .es domains for £14.99. I know lots of people have had problems with them before, but I've never had any real difficulties that I can think of with 123-reg, so went ahead and registered the domain. It was all very painless and went through like a normal domain registration.

A few hours later - probably because I've been spoilt by recent ultra quick domain setups - I tried the domain and it wasn't resolving. Then I went over to www.nic.es to check, and it was still saying the domain I registered was available. I kept an eye on it throughout the day and this didn't change. By this morning, I was getting a bit miffed. When I decide I want a domain, I find I want it under my control ASAP just in case someone else buys it before you have a chance. So I started looking for other registrars and found Nameroute. I tried to register the same domain as the original, but with a hyphen in it which I had planned to buy anyway. It went through, they sent me a username and password that didn't work and several hours later, the domain was still showing as available on nic.es

I was definitely fed up at this point, so I headed on over to EuroDNS where everything went smoothly and within 40 minutes both the domains were registered and listed as belong to me with nic.es.

I have no idea if the problems I had with 123reg and Nameroute were one offs, or maybe they are just a bit slow with .es domains, but from the three companies I have used in the last day or so, the only one I would recommend to you for registering .es domains is EuroDNS. They are affiliate links by the way - I wasn't going to bother signing up but when I think a company does a genuinly great job, I like to promote them.

Labels: domain names