“Important” Registrar Parava Gets Breach Notice
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Registrar with valuable domain names receives breach notice from ICANN.
Parava Networks, Inc. dba 10-Domains.com, has received a breach notice (pdf) from ICANN for some pretty serious issues:
1. Not paying its accreditation fees to ICANN
2. Not escrowing its whois information as required
3. Failure to take steps to correct inaccurate whois information
You may not have heard of Parava Networks, so why does this matter? For one thing, Marc Ostrofsky (famous for selling Business.com) keeps a lot of his domains there: MutualFunds.com, Bachelor.com, Consulting.com, etc.
I recall that iREIT may have kept some of its names there when it was formed, but I’m not sure if it has any with Parava now.
It appears that ICANN has a correct address for Parava, but the registrar has a tough time keeping its own whois information up-to-date. Parava.com’s whois record shows an address on Westheimer Road in Houston. Here’s what happened when KnujOn sent a letter to that address:
According to RegistrarStats, Parava has about 33,000 domain names under management. My guess is if they aren’t paying accreditation fees and escrowing whois data, the breaches won’t be cured in time.
Further Reading:
- ICANN Terminates Parava Domain Name Registrar
- Parava To Give Tucows’ Hover Brand a Boost
- 2009 Domain Dunce Award: Parava
Tags: marc ostrofsky, parava networks
Thank you for the heads up Andrew. One of my friends has his domain(s) registered with Parava. I noticed a problem with them a pretty long time ago also. My friend paid 10 yrs out on renewal. It was Months later and the domain was showing to me it was expiring in less then 60 days and Parava never sent the money to the registry. Parava waited until 5 days before expiry to pay the renewal, but the renewal was paid by the customer Months before.
Jamie – that’s a huge red flag. I’ve heard of registrars taking multi-year renewals and then waiting to renew each year. It’s a sign they’re running out of cash.
I agree Andrew. At first, I questioned DomainTools.com and it’s whois, as I checked via Parava’s whois and it showed the domain was renewed until 2017, but the registry didn’t etc. Jay did a follow up post when I contacted him and didn’t speak of Parava directly in the post but did mention back then it was a warning sign. This was April 2008 http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/04/the-warning-signs-of-another-registerfly/
The simple fact, The Registry holds the proper expiry date no matter what your “registrar” whois says and it doesn’t hurt to check your whois at the registry to make sure your registrar is paying the renewals you have paid for.
[...] month ICANN sent a breach notice to domain registrar Parava Networks. Among several serious breaches, one of Parava’s faults [...]
[...] all over for Parava Networks, a domain name registrar that manages valuable domain names such as Marc Ostrofsky’s [...]
[...] number of valuable domain names are registered at Parava. Parava is the registrar for over 30,000 domain [...]
This is a drag. I stopped using them to host my sites years ago, but maintained the register “relationship”, if you will. Just tried to access my account to change the DNS on a couple of my sites, and it’s no luck there. Get a 403, and other errors. Dad gum-it. What the world can we do to transfer sites to another registering company, when the one who has the documentation / information, on our sites are shut down?
[...] sent a breach notice to Parava on February 27th, notifying it of major infractions including not paying accreditation [...]