If you ever want to replace your hosting stuart i use Knet basic its cheap and reliable. Plus the servers are in the UK.
They definitely should have contacted you before the renewal, that is unfair not to give you any warning. My company sends an email a month before, another at 2 weeks then its a phone call at 1 week, but then it's a relatively small company so we can realistically do that. But all hosting companies should at least send one automated email before the renewal.
Then you pay for the domain and move host, you dont have to stay with them you just have to cover your domain. Your logic is flawed tbh, if you went into starbucks should they assume you want another coffee and charge you before you've even finished your last one? No they shouldnt, and neither should one.com assume/force you to renew if you dont want to. Yes they shouldnt end up out of pocket but no they shouldnt force you to renew if you dont want to. I also have a small hosting business (design is my main forte) and we do not force people to renew like this, they have an option for recurring payments if they so wish.
Seems like a bit on the gray area to me. It WOULD be fair to note for changing fees, but then again, I'm sure those are written down somewhere, and have been available at the time you originally signed at them. It still ain't a huge amount of money if the host has been working fine.
Yeah the host has been pretty much fine with me to be honest. They helped me a lot when I couldn't get my homepage to load.
I never said you did have to stay with said registrar, but why would you want to pay a full years subscription, just to immediately transfer and pay another full year (unless its a .uk domain, in which case transfer should be free) That's hugely irrelevant, a domain name is by definition a subscription, a cup of coffee is, well, just a cup of coffee. The point is, if the renewal wasn't automatic, there would be a massive increase in expired/quarantined domains, which end up costing the customer a lot more (£80 in some cases), as well as possible website down time. It's like car insurance, they'll automatically renew your policy unless you tell them otherwise, if they didn't there would be a whole lot more un-insured drivers on the road who simply didn't realise their policy had expired. You said yourself you run a small company, so I bet you or someone in your company personally ensures that the customer is aware of their domain's impending expiry, and that's great. But imagine trying to do that for 500,000+ domain names, your overheads would go through the roof, and you'd have to price yourself out of business just to cover the administration costs
