RateTea.net Acquires RateTea.com And Is Now RateTea

Monday, December 19th, 2011We are pleased to announce that on December 16th, 2011, Merit Exchange LLC, the company that runs RateTea, acquired the domain RateTea.com. As of today, the site is now officially named RateTea, and the website has been switched over to the new domain RateTea.com. Although our fans have been referring to our site as RateTea for some time, this announcement marks the official transition.

We hope that this small change can be symbolic of the growth and improvements RateTea has been seeing.

Why did you not start as RateTea.com? Who owned RateTea.com before?

The domain RateTea.com was first owned by Josh Chamberlain, the owner of J-Tea International, a small tea company based in Eugene, Oregon, selling Taiwanese teas sourced directly from small farms. When RateTea was launched in 2009, as RateTea.net, this domain was unavailable, and the .net was purchased as a second-best choice.

Although we ended up registering the domain name after it expired, we want to recognize Josh Chamberlain for his integrity, with his generous offer of selling us the domain below the cost he incurred at purchasing it. We also want to recognize that he was actually earlier than us when it came to the idea of an interactive tea rating website, although we were the first to actually carry through with the idea.

Please update your links:

We will retain ownership of the old domain, RateTea.net, indefinitely. All links to the old site will remain valid, and will redirect to the corresponding pages on the new domain. However, we ask that from here on, you please link to and refer to RateTea.com as the domain of choice.

Thank you, and happy holidays!