How did this happen and how do I stop it? (Domain)

I'd been running in the black and then happened to check my account and I'm in the red. Looking around to see what happened, I see that I was charged $39.80 for a "4 year renewal" on a domain that's totally unimportant to me. It wouldn't matter if I lost it, so for sure I have no interest in getting a 4 year renewal! If I were going to renew for 4 years it'd be for one of my really important domains! How do I stop this? Or at the very least, change it to a 1 year renewal so I can get out of the red?

Go to the panel under Domains -> Registrations and turn off Auto Renew (Let Expire or Ask).

-Scott

That one's not listed under "Manage domain registrations" because I was in the midst of transferring it from Yahoo! Domains to DreamHost. I had a ton of domains at Yahoo but when they raised their prices to $34.95 per year for renewal, I said to heck with that and began transferring them over to DreamHost, starting with the ones that were almost ready to expire. I didn't care about this particular domain, but I wasn't quite ready to let it go, and it was about ready to expire, so I started the transfer process. As I said, the transfer isn't complete, in fact, I got charged by Yahoo anyway, so now I had to pay Yahoo $34.95 AND DreamHost is charging me $38+ for a freaking domain that, if I'd known this would have happened, I would have just canceled with nary a regret. Argh!

And again, as I said, even if I wanted to keep it, no way would I have had DreamHost renew it for *4 years*! I have no idea how that happened and it's very upsetting. And of course, there's no one to talk to and no one to complain to and no one to fix it. Get charged extra for something you don't want? Suck it up.

This just doesn't make any sense. Domain transfers cost $9.95 because DreamHost starts you off with a one year extension on the domain. I've never seen an option to transfer a domain over and renew for anything over one year. Did you get some email from DreamHost stating that the transfer was successful?

Plus the fact that it's not even listed in your Domain Registrations, which is the only place I've seen that lets you extend your registration beyond one year.

-Scott

I know! Pretty weird, eh? Here's a screen capture of the Billing area where it says that it was renewed for 4 years. I blanked out the name of the domain just because it's not an active domain and I'm not even using it. Luckily, I was able to request some donations from people and they came through for me, so everything's paid up now and I'm back on the black, but that doesn't negate that I was charged for 4 years when I just barely wanted 1!

http://wretchawry.com/2.jpg

Just send a message into support to get it fixed on our end at least. I would expect it would be something along the lines of we tried to do the transfer for you and the registrar system showed it getting renewed for 4 years.