19 ms·

How a domain registrar can kill your business

633 points by richeyrw 8y ago

iampims 8y ago
It is sad that often, a slightly less appealing .com domain is a better choice than a slick domain on an unreliable tld.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- astrodust 8y ago
  .io is run by morons. It's astounding that they haven't been fired.
notyourday 8y ago
Who on earth uses .io for production critical domains?
- Someone1234 8y ago
  These posts are tiring. > Who uses [any technology/infrastructure choice] on production?! A lot of people. That's always the answer.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    Using TLDs ran by monkey operators via registrars ran by barely competent companies is like screwing $5 full service hookers in NYC without a condom -- should you choose to do that you should not be surprised that you at best get gonorrhea and syphilis.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Who on Earth would buy a .io domain if it were advertised that it might stop working for days at a time and you had no recourse?
  - runnr_az 8y ago
    It's not like .io is run out of a backoffice somewhere these days. Afilias provides the backend -- they handle a lot of different TLDs...
- foepys 8y ago
  Here is the obligatory post about how bad .io treated security less than 1 year back [1]. Someone was able to take over the whole .io zone just by registering a few domains. 1: https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all-io-domains-with-a-targeted-registration/index.html https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...
- csdreamer7 8y ago
  .io domains are popular, especially among the HN crowd; despite the high price and poor practices of the registrar. You should know that being on HN.
  - x0x0 8y ago
    We use one. It had nothing to do with .io per se; it was just that .io hadn't been as throughly squatted yet.
    - tobltobs 8y ago
      Maybe that tell you something if even domain squatters avoid .io
djrogers 8y ago
That's a horrible situation, and one I'd encourage everyone to try to avoid - register production critical domains with a company that provides live phone support and stick with tried and true TLDs. Yeah, it may cost more, but this story just illustrates that you're staking your entire company on a $15/yr service, and you get what you pay for. Even if you want to run your marketing/landing page/etc off a .io or other fancy tld, run your production stuff off a .com or country-level equivalent so your customers aren't left in the lurch if something like this happens. - edit - punctuation
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Indeed, there's a reason large multi-nationals use companies like MarkMonitor as their Domain Register, even if they could get the same for $30/year, the potential loss in revenue and brand damage could be worth tens of thousands. It is a much harder balancing act for a startup, finding a domain register who is reputable and responsive but not "overly" expensive. Even if your entire business relies on it, $1K+/year just may not be in the cards even knowing the risks. I haven't used it but Google Domains claims they have telephone support and are reasonably priced. Might be worth people checking out, their Gsuite support has been pretty good.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    On what basis is your gsuite support -- Google's rep is "amongst the world's worst support unless your spending $millions" ...
    - Someone1234 8y ago
      I haven't found that with any paid Google products. Both Gsuite and Google Adword's support have always been very responsive and easy to reach.
      - paulie_a 8y ago
        Google support is completely garbage paid or free
jereze 8y ago
Algolia implemented a retry strategy on a different domain, TLD, and provider in their API clients. See step 14 of this article: http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/7/27/algolias-fury-road-to-a-worldwide-api-part-3.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/7/27/algolias-fury-road... Complicated to apply to a website, but it gives some thoughts.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
TL;DR .io
- creeble 8y ago
  I _think_ TL;DR Domain.com, unless this is common with other registrars? Is this a common problem in .io?
  - petercooper 8y ago
    .io has particularly long lead times for renewals with third party registrars. I ran into a similar issue 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704
trevordixon 8y ago
My registrar suspended my domain because an abusive user was using a subdomain for phishing. They told me they can't inform me first of abuse so I can deal with it; they'll suspend the domain immediately. Who's a good registrar that will contact me first if they get an abuse report?
- postit 8y ago
  I'm printing and framing this for the next time our PO brings this amazing sub-domain per user idea back on our backlog.
  - trevordixon 8y ago
    Yep, I've learned that hosting other people's stuff on your domain will harm the domain's reputation. Use a different domain for user content, and make it fungible.
  - mseebach 8y ago
    The problem was the phishing, not the subdomain. If your app allows users to run phishing operations, moving the content from user.foo.com to www.foo.com/user probably won't help much in parent's scenario.
    - Boulth 8y ago
      But it would help to run user content on user.foo.io just like Github.
    - txsh 8y ago
      No. The problem is the subdomain. Allowing people to phish on a subdomain is lending the phisher the credibility of legitimate websites hosted on the domain. It’s like lending a thief your uniform so that he can disguise himself as an employee. You’re an accomplice when he uses it to steal.
    - eToThePiIPower 8y ago
      I have to disagree. A phishing scam from "billing.foo.com" would be much harder to spot than one from "user-content.foo.com/billing". Especially if the user has free reign over the style + content. If the user is going to be able to design + style the pages any way they want, having something in the URL to indicate it's still user content is important.
hbosch 8y ago
The timing of this is an amazing coincidence — I recently “lost” my domain in the same way. I bought it originally on Namecheap but have since transferred all my domains into a singular Google Domains account. My main domain, where I have my personal site and all my important emails, disappeared without notice on Wednesday the 9th last week. No expiration notice sent, no information as to what had happened. I contacted Google as soon as I noticed and hey have been alright to deal with. Fortunately I am a Gsuite customer. I had to pay a fee to renew and another fee to restore, which was over $100. It’s been in “restoration” mode, ie offline, for days now and I am unable to even touch the DNS records until it’s back. I’ve already lost a week of uptime with zero recourse. FWIW I use a .co domain, and my site was throwing (for 24hrs or so) a splash page saying the domain was suspended. Eagerly awaiting for it to come back but I’m totally in the dark as to timing.
- creeble 8y ago
  Did the domain expire, or was there some other issue? I just transferred some .com domains to Google from Name.com, I hope these expiry problems are limited to non- .com TLDs...
  - Alupis 8y ago
    I've always received multiple emails from them leading up to a domain expiration. Not easy to miss, unless your whois email contact isn't current. (Google Domains gives you free whois privacy, but they use that contact for notifications)
    - anothergoogler 8y ago
      I get so many emails from Google leading up to and after expiration it's a nuisance. As for parent's issue, I think if you let your domain expire that's 100% on you.
      - jethro_tell 8y ago
        Yeah it's hard to feel bad when they start warning you 90 days in advance
jiveturkey 8y ago
thought this would be another idiotic story but it’s actually valuable. still, some blame falls in their shoulders, cutting it so close. anyway: use mark monitor. don’t know if they do .io though.
- judge2020 8y ago
  While they did cut it close for looking at renewal status, based on the following quote from the article, I can infer that the domain was set to auto-renew: > I knew our domain should be renewed about these dates, and we were already billed for this renewal.
alexandernst 8y ago
Related - https://medium.com/@alexandernst/from-successful-to-zero-thanks-to-namecheap-d392c76b2ffd https://medium.com/@alexandernst/from-successful-to-zero-tha...
- justherefortart 8y ago
  TL;DR: Don't use namecheap.com either.
csdreamer7 8y ago
Never heard of domain.com. If anyone wants a recommendation I use namecheap and have never had a problem. They are supporters of the EFF and Net Neutrality. Edit: If you are going to downvote, state why. Namecheap is a good service for a good price and supports Internet freedom. When even GoDaddy was supporting SOPA Namecheap took a stand against SOPA.
- tux1968 8y ago
  Namecheap online support is seriously kick-butt great. Only complaint is that they don't support Letsencrypt certificates with their web hosting plans.
  - csdreamer7 8y ago
    Yeah, I noticed that. What did they used to charge before Letsencrypt? $20?
  - minimaul 8y ago
    And yet, my experience with namecheap support was terrible. Screwed up the glue on the main domain in use for email, and after a week they still hadn’t resolved it. I fixed it by moving elsewhere. Edit: the lesson I learned from this was - don’t use a bargain basement company for one of your company’s most important assets.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ingenium 8y ago
  I use Namecheap and I generally like them. However I was having a repeat issue for several months using them for DNS with DNSSEC enabled. Basically, validation would fail because they'd let their records expire and "forget" to resign them. I'd notice my domains failing to resolve, and had to manually create a new record and delete it to force all my records to be resigned. Support seemed clueless, and I stumbled across this workaround by accident. I opened multiple support tickets with them, and each time the issue would re-appear in 1-3 months. Went on for probably a year or so and I was just about to move to a different DNS provider when it stopped happening.
cremp 8y ago
I had some fun with NameCheap and the xyz tlds. Turns out, CentralNic (who actually runs the zones) was not doing proper validation on the glue records, and not removing old ones. NameCheap was sending CentralNic cached records, and managed to foobar my domain glues. I bypassed NameCheap, because I knew they weren't the ones actually maintaining the records (registrars are just middle-men.) Using the DNS contact in the SOA, I got a response within 12 hours, and it was fully resolved within 24 hours (minus propagation.) CentralNic contacted NameCheap, as did I, and they got their system fixed within the week. --Edit-- CentralNic, not Nic. The roots were to nic.xyz.
madengr 8y ago
Back in the late 90's before it was Verisign (I can't recall the name), my domain registration could only be changed with an email from my domain. Of course I didn't have my domain up since I switched ISP and had to move my DNS and mail server. Catch 22; what a cluster fuck. Weeks of phone calls with no resolutions. I was going to Virginia anyway, so I physically showed up at Verisign (I wanted to bring a baseball bat), and explained it to the lady at the front desk. She came back with an engineer who fixed it in 5 minutes. As a side note, had to do something similar with Garmin. They kept sending me GPS units with horizontal LCD polarization, when vertical is the standard for sun glasses. Showed up and told the clerk to put on my sunglasses and turn her head sideways to her LCD monitor. "Oh yeah, I see". She fetched an engineer, and 1 week later had a GPS with correct polarization. Sometimes it takes a physical presence; baseball bat optional.
- ballenf 8y ago
  I'm so happy for OLED phones so I can use GPS in either orientation without severe distortion/dimming.
- gm-conspiracy 8y ago
  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/
  - madengr 8y ago
    Exactly. One of my favorite movies.
  - tsomctl 8y ago
    With that advertisement for Spider Man, that's the last time I ever click an IMDB link.
- gist 8y ago
  > before it was Verisign (I can't recall the name) NetworkSolutions.com > so I physically showed up at Verisign (I wanted to bring a baseball bat) Did you think to write a simple postal letter to them (say a VP or the CEO) rather than get angry enough to show up with a bat? Or send Fedex? Sure you shouldn't have to do that but from a practical angle it may have paid to do that.
woodruffw 8y ago
I used a free domain coupon from domain.com a few years ago, and was spammed with both snail mail and robocalls (advertising services for the domain) for months afterwards. I don't know whether they're selling customer data or what, but it left me with a very negative image of their company.
- gist 8y ago
  > I don't know whether they're selling customer data or what, but it left me with a very negative image of their company. Whois is public and has always been as required by ICANN. If you don't understand how things work then be fair and don't blame what you think is the obvious cause or reason. There are valid reasons for whois being public and all registrars have this in their agreement and it is widely known.
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    I know how WHOIS works. The letters were sent to my academic address, not the professional address I disclosed to WHOIS.
  - tacon 8y ago
    Whois is going dark shortly for at least six months, and maybe forever, due to GDPR. So much for the public Whois.
OrganicMSG 8y ago
Don't use *.io anyway. The domains are being sold under a very morally dubious arrangement, given the UK kicked all the people off the island of Chagos and gave the domain registration to a private entity. https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/ https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-... The UK government's view of the Chagossians at the time they gave the island to the USA for a military base was apalling: “Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and who are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius.”
foobarbazetc 8y ago
If you can, just transfer your domains to Google Domains and never worry about shady registrars again. (We also use Dynadot [good], Hexonet [good], Uniregistry [... okay].)
- Boulth 8y ago
  Uhm, wait, did you just recommend Google with their automated support? Or does Google Domains have better support since you're paying? I'm genuinely curious about that.
- joecool1029 8y ago
  Terrible idea. While Google's registrar seems ok right now, Google's support is nonexistent when things go wrong. Literally every bit of their support is outsourced to 3rd-party companies that provide no path of escalation. Even the really bad registrars (and there are a ton) usually have some direct support (or resell off enom, which will extort your money for the privilege of bailing you out).
  - sebst 8y ago
    That's the point. Domains causes no problems. Only in some weird scenarios, things can become troublesome. In those cases you need a support. In others you don't. If you have a domain registrar with a good support, account the premium you pay as such: a premium for an insurance when things go bad.
  - Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
    Plus Google will illegally seize your domain if they don't like you.
- Blindedwino 8y ago
  I'm curious, what makes you say that Uniregistry is "...okay"?
mhkool 8y ago
I recommend using easydns.com as the registrar and DNS service. Their email helpdesk is fast: <30 minutes. They answer the phone immediately and they are knowledgeable. Phone support is during business hours, but the more expensive packages have 24hour support. And yeah, you need to have a lot of faith to use .io or other new TLDs which are serviced by new companies.
- SaltySolomon 8y ago
  .io is not a new domain tho, it's the country tld for Indian Ocean.
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  I use also easydns and hover and have nothing but good things to say about the support for both of these registrars.
  - massaman_yams 8y ago
    +1 for Hover. No problems in close to a decade.
  - thomk 8y ago
    Same here for hover. Customer support is excellent and emails about expiring or renewing domains are timely.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Okay, anyone want to confirm or add other DNS registrars to the "One of the good ones" list? Ive been recommending my friends to do the entire thing through Dreamhost including a WP install. I personally am more technical, and have my domain name from 7 years ago on godaddy. Any suggestions on where I should use? How about my incompetent friends?
  - RX14 8y ago
    I've always heard good things about gandi
hk__2 8y ago
Something that scares me regarding domain names is their variable cost. I purchased a .sexy domain for a joke website and its price got raised by +70% less than one year after that, making the joke a lot less appealing. There’s no guarantee that when you purchase a domain name it reasonably stays around that price for years. Build a business on a domain -> the name increase by XX% -> you’re screwed and must pay.
- sebst 8y ago
  If it's a joke, okay, 70% might hurt. .sexy is about 60-100$ per year. If you've build a business on it, paying double the amount should not hurt. For me the most important thing about this new gTLDs is more about reputation of the gTLD registry. What if these go out of service? I'm pretty sure that there exist a protocol for that case, but I'm also sure that domains in a less popular new gTLD space might get far less protection from ICANN than any non-sponsored gTLD.
  - Gustomaximus 8y ago
    > sexy is about 60-100$ per year. If you've build a business on it, paying double the amount should not hurt I feel the issue is the lack of transparency and control. Who is to say some registrar won't start charging people per visit or % revenue in the future?
    - sebst 8y ago
      Sure, I hear you. If it's a registrar, it's okay, simply change it. For a registry, I believe that they would risk their mass market business cases, but I'm also very sceptical about those ngTLDs for that reason.
- Kelbit 8y ago
  Avoid the new gTLDs. Most are mismanaged crap. The gTLD system was the greedist and worst decision ICANN ever made. Stick with tried and true domains - ideally .com, but your country's ccTLD is another good choice.
AviationAtom 8y ago
Here's my plug for NameSilo. Try them and you will not regret it.
ai_ja_nai 8y ago
I recall UnitedDomains (German provider) who wanted me in 2016 to fax the request to update the contact information. Fax it. Times are mature for the equivalent of Letsencrypt for registering domains, something like Letsregistrar. We need to have this inefficient industry wiped away since it's really too much manual and too much in the way. If somebody wants to found a noprofit to create a free registrar, I'm 100% in.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  >I recall UnitedDomains (German provider) who wanted me in 2016 to fax the request to update the contact information. Fax it. I had a similar experience with an Austrian registrar a few years ago. Must be a regional thing, since Austria is Germany's Canada.
  - billforsternz 8y ago
    Nice pattern identification. I live in New Zealand and we are Australia's Canada.
- sebst 8y ago
  > I recall UnitedDomains ... United Domains rely on manual things very for a large part of domain related service processes which are "uncommon" for a private or small domain owner. > If somebody wants to found a noprofit to create a free registrar, I'm 100% in. For the German market I remember the good old times with InternetX before they were bought by United Internet. Had some good talks with their tech support back then. A "free" registrar is maybe not the right solution. The key is "care" for your domain. Take your example of "letsencrypt". They exist because they automate everything. They don't "care" if your certificate causes troubles, they'd just fix their API. With domain registrars the story is different: You need a good support to prevent fraud, you need a good contact to registries if something goes wrong. Key learning here is: In 99% of the cases with domains, everything is fine. But if you find yourself in the 1% where trouble occurs, you need immediate support of competent people. Not sure if this is a case for a "community" or "free" registrar. More a business case for MarkMonitor without the Brand Protection: Simply a domain registrar who cares.
tobltobs 8y ago
I always wonder how people care about "good prices" if they choose a registrar. Quite often the domain name is the most valuable asset of your company. As long as you are not a domain squatter you shouldn't care about if you pay $10 or $1000 per year. And if possible register the name for the next 10 years in advance.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  I agree, but not all domains are fully fledged corporate entities - some of us just throw together fun things randomly and for that it's nice to have an $0.88 TLD.
sudouser 8y ago
nearlyfreespeech.net provide great service, notifications and overall highly recommended. been customer with several domains transferred or registered with them over the past tears
- jwilk 8y ago
  They don't support registering ccTLDs, such as .io: https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/domainregistration/tlds#tlds https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/domainregistration/...
tcarn 8y ago
You'd have a fantastic case for a lawsuit against them. Good job keeping a paper trail.
gwbas1c 8y ago
I transferred two domains from Ghandi to Lunarpages over a decade ago. Somehow, Ghandi's anonymization service was still enabled, and as a result, my domains were blocked a few months ago. Took about a week for Lunarpages to straighten out. (BTW, the spam calls started immediately after Lunarpages fixed the problem. It's a great thing that the EU finally twisted ICANN's arm over this issue.)
davidgh 8y ago
I recall a time when a company I had association with lost their main domains due to a failed renewal. In this case it was a long-term employee who left the company that had loads of company bills going to his card. He cancelled the card sometime after he left and the domains were not renewed. I’m not sure where the renewal failure emails were going but probably some unmonitored admin email box. These were very important domains. Without them, this $1 billion+ company immediately lost all of its ability to generate revenue. It was quite shocking. The problem was discovered when users started getting the registrar’s landing pages rather than the company website pages. It was fixed relatively quickly once identified but do to DNS propagation took about 48 hours for complete resolution. During the window unrecoverable revenue well into the hundreds of thousands was lost. It seems to me that a domain renewal is always a risk, even with a highly reliable registrar. A good defense is to limit the renewals for important domains by registering them for as long as possible (10 years). Even then you have a weak spot because your credit card will be expired by then so you should back that up with a calendar reminder a few months prior to renewal to make sure everything is set.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Personally, I'd rather have a corporate domain be renewed once per year and have a defined process for it (e.g. literally have a binder somewhere listing all the details, and put reviewing it on a checklist of other yearly legal and financial tasks) than have it be forgotten about for 10 years at a time.
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    I've set it up before to have 10y which is the max, and renew for 1 year every year. So the domain always has a lead time of 9-10 years but it is still renewed once a year for practice. for most domains thats like 100 bucks to lock it down for 10 years. You can also monitor the domain expiry in your monitoring system i.e. nagios or whatever you are using.
    - imhoguy 8y ago
      Great idea!
dylanpyle 8y ago
I had a related issue where a previous registrar — who we had moved away from months before — managed to accidentally "claw back" and disable our domain due to a misconfigured billing script. The fragility of the whole ecosystem is pretty scary. Wrote it up on Medium @ https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-internet-together-12118be60ff1 https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-inte...
petercooper 8y ago
I had similar beef with a .io domain name many years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704
damieng 8y ago
Do not rely on other people to resolve time-sensitive issues when you can easily avoid it. In this particular case as soon as it's clear the domain hasn't renewed despite being billed then manually renew it using the usual user interface, pay the extra $10 and then contact support after to get one of the charges refunded now the time-sensitivity is gone. The stress alone isn't worth being out of pocket $10 let alone only for a week or two.
- teraflop 8y ago
  According to one of the comments in the support ticket (at the end of the article) the registrar did not allow manually renewing the domain.
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    I believe that's true, I think the point stands though, when you realize a shit storm is coming, that's the right time to open your umbrella. Waiting until you've been out of business for three days is a little late. I probably wouldn't stick around as a customer, not because they got screwed here but because they stood there with their hands on their head and watched the train wreck. That's the difference between amateurs and pros (and the pros learned this the hard way)
theoh 8y ago
Yep. "“Sunkenness” refers to the fact that intangible assets tend to have little or no market value, unlike, say, land or a factory. They have value as part of their owner’s business, but not to anybody else. This means that investment in intangible assets is risky." https://www.ft.com/content/a01e7262-d35a-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5f44 https://www.ft.com/content/a01e7262-d35a-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5...
pascalxus 8y ago
For those who want the short version: Never EVER use domain.com as your domain registrar. Yikes! i really feel bad for those guys at uptimechecker.io
jlarocco 8y ago
I'm not sure the domain registrar is completely at fault here. If your website going down will "kill your business" then it's a good idea to use a reputable one and not the cheapest you can find. And looking at domain.com just now, they don't seem to offer .io domains, so I wonder how he even got the domain there?
wycy 8y ago
They might have completely shut you out with the silent treatment because they think you might sue. So maybe you should.
belorn 8y ago
Big domain registrars operates usually on such a low profit margins that a single support ticket cost more than that customer will ever create in revenue. This create a very clear incentive models to focus on growth and keeping support costs down. I work at a smaller registrar and we usually close (resolve) tickets within minutes and as a policy under the hour. We depend on word of mouth and contacts for sale, so we kind of have the opposite incentive model. I may be biased but I recommend avoiding the race to the bottom registrars for business critical domains.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Given that you’re in the industry perhaps you could list both yourself and your best, most reliable competitors. It’ll benefit all of you. And all of us.
flurdy 8y ago
Domain registrar and DNS for a company are too critical and fragile to go cheap on. For personal, hobby, one-off marketing domains; sure go cheap. But for something you earn money from? Go with highy recommended providers. Registrars with a secure administration, good track record of customer service, high reliability, etc. Also spread the risk around. Don't have domain, DNS, and services with one provider. E.g. register domain with Gandhi, Hover etc, use DNS from Cloudflare, Route56, etc, and host with GCP, Heroku etc (for example). And use several providers if you have multiple domains in case one implodes. That way not all of your domains disappears overnight. And as many have mentioned already on this topic: Have well documented, well practised renewal processes, and renew for multiple years if possible.
- mmt 8y ago
  > And use several providers if you have multiple domains in case one implodes. I'd add only on refinement: if possible, use domains with different top-level (national) authorities. Sadly, this kind of operational wisdom is rapidly being lost by the emphasis on hiring "DevOps" engineers, with most of the emphasis on the "Dev" part, since they're often just coders against cloud APIs, with much less value placed on traditional sysadmin (or what ended up being called operations engineering during and after the dot-com boom) experience. Now, of course, that makes sense not to hire a full-time 100% sysadmin if what you (think you) need is a 5% (or less) sysadmin. Also, most startups, and probably even larger businesses, are going to be easily lulled into complacency by the uptime records of the larger vendors (or really just AWS), when following the best practices for technical reliability. "Infrastructure as code" is supposed to alleviate the human/administrative risk, and I'm actually convinced that it does to a very large degree (just at a huge cost in markup/profit for Amazon for that infrastructure).
bluedonuts 8y ago
We spend lot of time thinking about making our services resilient against failure at the infrastructure level yet the domain registrar is often overlooked. Not only do you have to worry about them making a technical mistake there is also the risk of a phishing attack. A while back I did a bit of research about what was the most reliable registrar and the only one that i could find was Markmonitor. Most of the big sites (google.com facebook.com etc) use them. They offer lots of cool features that i had never heard of like registrar level locking and custom 'protocols' (like a phonecall from X no. of authorised people) to validate a change. Plus some others that seemed less interesting (to me) such as the brand protection. They do of course charge a pretty penny. From memory there was a minimum cost of $30k per year which allowed you pretty much as many domains as you might want and the promise of being able to get ahold of a human if something goes wrong.
gotrythis 8y ago
None of the .ly domain registrars have auto-renew. They have an option to send you a yearly invoice and a link to login, which they call "auto-renew", but it doesn't actually take the all-important step of renewing. Lost a great domain because of that.
giobox 8y ago
This is one of the potential drawbacks of using ccTLDs like .io - individual nations are afforded much more control in the administration and dispute resolution process than gTLDs. Unfortunately some are run more poorly than others, which is why in this case the support agent states: "Unlike common domain names [gTLDs] like .com or .nets. .IO's are managed by a specific organization, that manages only .IO domain names..." .IO of course being the ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory, run by these chaps: http://www.icb.co.uk/ http://www.icb.co.uk/ At any rate, it's worth bearing in mind that ccTLDs are not administered the same way as a gTLD, and weird issues like this that are a pain to resolve can happen.
- busterarm 8y ago
  And every couple of years someone finds this out the hard way and goes on a big rant like this one. Particularly with the .IO ccTLD. Or .LY. It tells me that the person running the business isn't very good at estimating the business risk of the technology they're using. That's when I start hoping I'm not a customer of theirs and invariably find out that I'm not. Phew.
DenisM 8y ago
So, how does one prepare for the worst? Let’s brainstorm: 0. Register alternative domains in advance with a different registrar. 1. Setup mailing list for all registered users and be prepared to blast them with a new domain. 2. Make mobile apps check both the main and the alternative domains. 3. Make the mobile app notify the user of a new domain name requirement via push notification and the like. 4. Setup the phone system so that it can read the new domain before connecting support. 5. Setup support on a different domain (e.g. zen desk). If zendesk goes down users will know to call us, if the main site goes down they may remember to check zendesk. 6...?
- maaark 8y ago
  -1. Choose a domain registrar & TLD not known to be fishy or incompetent (so not .io)
sammy241 8y ago
DON'T GET SCAMMED!!!... I am a single mother of 2 boys, I needed a loan to pay for tuition fees for my sons but had negative listings and bad credit records which was caused by my strugglings to make ends meet since lost my husband to cancer. I needed a way out. I contacted over 4 different hackers which I got ripped off even though i told them about my situation and that i was also widow. They were still heartless and took my money without rendering the services they promised to. I thank God for my sister who introduced me to a hacker of hers who could help. We contacted him and with a reasonable amount of money my bad listings were flushed out in a week. It felt like magic as i remember shedding tears of joy on that very day. Contact him if you need such service at QUADHACKED(at)GMAIL(com)COM. He is the only one i trust.
eightturn 8y ago
This sorta reminds me of when Regions Bank forgot to renew its domain name.. for everything a smart business can do to acquire customers, developing groundbreaking software, etc - sometimes the things that break are the most obvious and mundane.. https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/regions-bank-fails-to-renew-domain-name-web-site-goes-down/ https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/regions-bank-fails-to-rene...
berbec 8y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but this is something I've always wondered. You can setup fail over DNS servers, just list different DNS servers, possibly from different companies, with your registrar. Is the registrar a unavoidable single-point of failure? Your multiple name servers are listed with your one-and-only-one registrar, no matter what?
- txsh 8y ago
  This wasn’t a technical problem with the domain. The DNS changed because op’s registrar failed to renew the domain. The website was working intermittently because of propagation, not a server issue. Problems like this are why registrars renew domains a month before they expire. The way to avoid these issues is to check to see if your domain renews on time. If your registrar fails to renew it, you have ample time to transfer it to another registrar.
  - berbec 8y ago
    I understand it wasn't a technical problem. I was wondering if it was possible to have a backup listing of your nameservers in some fashion?
lopmotr 8y ago
I don't know if this is a culture thing or personal style, but the author keeps emphasizing that the story is true. To me, that reduces credibility since I've often heard false stories whose narrators reiterated their truthfulness unexpectedly when I wasn't doubting them. Not very reliable logic, I know, but it's a small warning bell.
txsh 8y ago
Mistakes and glitches happen. Op should have noticed their domain did not renew a month before it expired, not just before. DNS and domain propagation are slow turning ships. If a problem occurs, you sometimes need days to straighten out the problems. > I tried to set nameservers to correct values, but Control panel returned error: uptimechekcer.io is not managed here! They misspelled their own domain in this article. It seems their problem is a lack of attention to detail. The complaint about charging for domain registration is nonsense. Domain registrations are non-refundable. If a registrar ever registered domains for customers before payment, they’d quickly find themselves out of business. Payment is always up front across the industry.
nodesocket 8y ago
If this service was some run of the mill e-commerce or SaaS I wouldn't have this reaction, but being a critical monitoring service that was down for days, this reflects very poorly on them. My reaction is that I'd never use uptimechecker.io. Quite honestly I am baffled why they'd even want to write this post for others unaware of their company and the outage to discover. It does not reflect well on them, despite spinning it and rightly blaming domain.com. Just use a respected and well known registrar such as Amazon Route 53 domains. This could have all been avoided. I know the blame "should" fall on domain.com, but ultimately startups are responsible for their service.
- adventist 8y ago
  Wasn't their fault. Their users deserve to know exactly what happened. I value transparency.
  - nodesocket 8y ago
    Absolutely, send your current customers an e-mail explaining... Just not convinced a public blog post is good business for them moving forward.
lowtto 8y ago
Yes I've heard of domain.com . In fact, we even used it for one of our products. We tried to purchase wildcard ssl via their control panel - the result was a delay from our go live schedule by as much as more than a week. It was the most horrible control panel I've ever used honestly. Feels like bug from the alpha release candidate V1 bugs list. there's this weird bug when it suddenly delete all our mailboxes for no reason. The moment we saw that bug we immediately stop using it. The support? The first guy that tends to you will always be the most stupidest one. You almost always had to insist to get/ be forwarded to a senior level support with actual brain. tl;dr Stay 100 miles away from domain.com . By the way it wasn't me that chose domain.com . I would never buy from any website that looks like this.
pawal 8y ago
For a very long time, DNS simply has not been an identified risk for most corporations. In the risk analysis they make, DNS is not on the map at all, even though it may be a single point of complete collapse for them. Thus we see extremely large corporations depending on a single DNS provider, using a registrar that are more interested in profit rather than resilience against attacks, no DNSSEC. Etc etc. This is slowly changing. What is. Not changing fast enough is the ability to run more than one DNS provider, giving you yet another spof.
ek750 8y ago
This is an interesting discussion, as I’ve recently run into problems with transferring a domain from domain.com to google domains. I’ve heard good things about google domains in the past and the price seemed right (never had a problem with domain.com, but they charge separately for domain privacy) and now I’m stuck in Vonnegut-like situation. They locked my account because apparently the record that was transferred in doesn’t exactly match my uploaded govt ID. I can’t/won’t change my legal name, and the account is locked so I can’t fix the record. The phone support was sympathetic but said I had to go through email, which I’m pretty sure is an AI. This has been going on for a month now, and I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get this resolved. I haven’t seen any discussion or experiences people have with AWS route 53. Is that a valid option? Seems reasonable and has privacy included.
hellweaver666 8y ago
I worked at a domain registrar for over ten years. Every day I would have to deal with a call from some irate customer who's business was down because they forgot to renew the domain. This was after we would send them emails, starting a month before the renewal was due and then more frequently the closer they got to the renewal date. Many times they wouldn't even notice until the domain had passed the grace period, fully expired and been snatched up by some scalper and replaced with adverts. Then they would be on the phone claiming to be losing thousands of pounds for every minute the website was offline and how it needed to be resolved right now or they would be sending in their lawyers. If your business resolves around having a functional website, make sure you have a solid domain renewal plan in place and are hosting with a trustworthy registrar.
- dheera 8y ago
  > This was after we would send them emails Did your e-mails look like spam by any chance? e.g. contain images, look like newsletters, contain tracking pixels, etc. -- most such e-mails get auto-deleted on my end.
risratorn 8y ago
The whole domain registration system is a very complex and messy area to work with, both from a development as an enduser perspective. I speak from experience working at a hosting company implementing domain registrations directly with the registry systems. It's a incomprehensible mishmash of tld's implementing different methods of registering, renewing, restoring, domains. Some require ID verification before registrations, some have a quarantine of 1 week, other of 4 weeks, some no quarantine. Some domains need to be renewed before expiry, some can still be used 2 weeks after expiry, some domains allow transfers and trades, others don't or do under strict circumstances. Some require transfer codes, others don't. Some transfer codes are valid for 1 week, some are valid for longer. There is no decent standarization on the technical level when it comes to managing domain registrations. There is the EPP protocol but almost none of the registries implement a standardized way of registering domains each implementing a mess of extensions to suit their bureaucratic needs. ICANN introducing over 1.2k new gTLD's some time ago also didn't help along with the introcution of domains containing non standard latin characters and the puny-code implementation there (eg: café.com is actually listed as xn--caf-dma.com) I'm not trying to defend domain.com who obviously failed to deliver on the basics of decent support, but things like this (issues between domain vendor and registry) happen more than most of us like to admit.
ahje 8y ago
I work for a domain registrar, albeit not the one mentioned in the article. Obviously, we see a lot of expired domains on a daily basis, mainly because customer's forget to renew despite us reminding them repeatedly during the three months before the domains expire. General advice: 1) Make sure there is more than one single contact person for invoicing. All too often, the problem is that a single employee is unavailable for some reason and that the rest of the business have no idea that the domain needs to be renewed. 2) Keep the contact details valid and up-to-date. This should be a no-brainer but a surprisingly large amount of businesses have domains registered to single employees, or with invalid contact emails. 3) Don't wait until the domains expire; renew the domains for at least one additional year. It will give you a whole year to fix stuff if you forget a reminder. EDIT: Or if the registrar screws up like in this case. 4) Automatic renewals is your friend. It's a last line of defense if all else fails. 5) Make sure you have a process for handling all of the above, even if you're a one-man business. Domain names are often critical for the business, and it's ridiculous to let the entire business rely upon a reminder sent 90 days before expiry.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  They payed for the renewal in time. The registrar didn't forward it "in time", which is apparently a requirement from .io.
  - ahje 8y ago
    In this case, the registrar obviously screwed up. Still, if the domain had been renewed for an additional year already, the domain would not have been expired. As sad as it may seem, you need to take other people's incompetence into account when you're dealing with business-critical things like domain names.
    - pmlnr 8y ago
      The domain was paid, the registrar took the money, but .io didn't renew it, because they need the renewal notice at least 3 days prior to expiry. It was a registrar screw up, but my main take away is: avoid .io like plague. See also: https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-production-traffic-b6aa17eeac20 https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...
FrozenVoid 8y ago
There are 100 year domains renewals/registrations if anyone wonders. So if they really wanted to safeguard it, they could of done it. https://www.networksolutions.com/domain-name-registration/popup-100-yr-term.jsp https://www.networksolutions.com/domain-name-registration/po... https://www.tonic.to/faq.htm#12 https://www.tonic.to/faq.htm#12
chmod775 8y ago
Yes well. Don't use .io domains for anything serious. I had one of the 20 largest .io domains for a time, until they shut us down because they received one complaint in 3 years. It took them 2 days after we resolved the matter to put the domain back online as well. By that time I had already migrated to .org - which is run by a considerably more professional non-profit organization.
ataturk 8y ago
At my job, if I told the story like that, I'd be told "I'm being too negative."
maxehmookau 8y ago
A lot of domain registrars seem to go for the "pile it high, sell it cheap" business model. I think as with any other commodity that a tech business (or any business!) needs to run, you pick your suppliers carefully. In the UK, I wouldn't touch 123Reg with a stick because I know their support is terrible. I would however use Gandi or AWS as I know their support is decent.
prasanthmj 8y ago
ICANN should make it mandatory for the domain registrars to send reminders at least 1 month before expiry.
rakibtg 8y ago
I had similar experience with domain.com Their support team is from India, and they took a week to solve the issue. I am looking for good domain service provider to transfer all of my domains 30+ Any recommendations? We use Digitalocean as the hosting service provider
- aheppy 8y ago
  I've used Namecheap for many years and have found them very reliable and their customer service responsive.
josefresco 8y ago
I create websites for small businesses. I've seen almost every conceivable domain renewal failure in my 20 years of experience. No matter how many times we remind clients to get this aspect of their business documented we still have sites go down every year. We charge a fee to "manage" domains for those who opt-in, solely for this reason (and it's worth it). The most common reasons: Bad contact email Auto renew off Expired CC Lost password The more obscure: Bought domain through a reseller who is now out of business (more common than you think) "Branded" contact email which post expiration, no longer works. Disgruntled "losing" webmaster who registered domain under his/her account and is now holding it hostage.
moistoreos 8y ago
Just to be fair, this person waited until 3 days before expiration to verify that everything was ok with his registrar. They should have done this 90 days ago. Create and implement a business policy to have IT come up with a procedure to check this quarterly. There's no really any excuse for a tech company to have this happen.
ivan78 8y ago
On my previous job we had to manage thousands of customer domains, including annual renewal. This was very tedious task, so I wrote a Perl script, scraping WHOIS and DNS data for all domains listed on our DNS servers. Based on this data every domain was assigned a status, such as "Ok", "misconfigured", "about to expire", "points to foreign DNS server" or "points to foreign Web server". This script was scheduled to run every other day and sent CSV report (full and diff from previous run) to a person responsible for domain renewal. Needless to say, our support specialists were very happy with this improvement.

633 points by richeyrw 8y ago

It is sad that often, a slightly less appealing .com domain is a better choice than a slick domain on an unreliable tld.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
astrodust 8y ago
.io is run by morons. It's astounding that they haven't been fired.

notyourday 8y ago

Who on earth uses .io for production critical domains?

Someone1234 8y ago
These posts are tiring. > Who uses [any technology/infrastructure choice] on production?! A lot of people. That's always the answer.
- notyourday 8y ago
  Using TLDs ran by monkey operators via registrars ran by barely competent companies is like screwing $5 full service hookers in NYC without a condom -- should you choose to do that you should not be surprised that you at best get gonorrhea and syphilis.
emodendroket 8y ago
Who on Earth would buy a .io domain if it were advertised that it might stop working for days at a time and you had no recourse?
- runnr_az 8y ago
  It's not like .io is run out of a backoffice somewhere these days. Afilias provides the backend -- they handle a lot of different TLDs...
foepys 8y ago
Here is the obligatory post about how bad .io treated security less than 1 year back [1]. Someone was able to take over the whole .io zone just by registering a few domains. 1: https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all-io-domains-with-a-targeted-registration/index.html https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...
csdreamer7 8y ago
.io domains are popular, especially among the HN crowd; despite the high price and poor practices of the registrar. You should know that being on HN.
- x0x0 8y ago
  We use one. It had nothing to do with .io per se; it was just that .io hadn't been as throughly squatted yet.
  - tobltobs 8y ago
    Maybe that tell you something if even domain squatters avoid .io

djrogers 8y ago

That's a horrible situation, and one I'd encourage everyone to try to avoid - register production critical domains with a company that provides live phone support and stick with tried and true TLDs. Yeah, it may cost more, but this story just illustrates that you're staking your entire company on a $15/yr service, and you get what you pay for. Even if you want to run your marketing/landing page/etc off a .io or other fancy tld, run your production stuff off a .com or country-level equivalent so your customers aren't left in the lurch if something like this happens. - edit - punctuation

Someone1234 8y ago
Indeed, there's a reason large multi-nationals use companies like MarkMonitor as their Domain Register, even if they could get the same for $30/year, the potential loss in revenue and brand damage could be worth tens of thousands. It is a much harder balancing act for a startup, finding a domain register who is reputable and responsive but not "overly" expensive. Even if your entire business relies on it, $1K+/year just may not be in the cards even knowing the risks. I haven't used it but Google Domains claims they have telephone support and are reasonably priced. Might be worth people checking out, their Gsuite support has been pretty good.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  On what basis is your gsuite support -- Google's rep is "amongst the world's worst support unless your spending $millions" ...
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    I haven't found that with any paid Google products. Both Gsuite and Google Adword's support have always been very responsive and easy to reach.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Google support is completely garbage paid or free

jereze 8y ago

Algolia implemented a retry strategy on a different domain, TLD, and provider in their API clients. See step 14 of this article: http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/7/27/algolias-fury-road-to-a-worldwide-api-part-3.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/7/27/algolias-fury-road... Complicated to apply to a website, but it gives some thoughts.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

TL;DR .io

creeble 8y ago
I _think_ TL;DR Domain.com, unless this is common with other registrars? Is this a common problem in .io?
- petercooper 8y ago
  .io has particularly long lead times for renewals with third party registrars. I ran into a similar issue 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704

trevordixon 8y ago

My registrar suspended my domain because an abusive user was using a subdomain for phishing. They told me they can't inform me first of abuse so I can deal with it; they'll suspend the domain immediately. Who's a good registrar that will contact me first if they get an abuse report?

postit 8y ago
I'm printing and framing this for the next time our PO brings this amazing sub-domain per user idea back on our backlog.
- trevordixon 8y ago
  Yep, I've learned that hosting other people's stuff on your domain will harm the domain's reputation. Use a different domain for user content, and make it fungible.
- mseebach 8y ago
  The problem was the phishing, not the subdomain. If your app allows users to run phishing operations, moving the content from user.foo.com to www.foo.com/user probably won't help much in parent's scenario.
  - Boulth 8y ago
    But it would help to run user content on user.foo.io just like Github.
  - txsh 8y ago
    No. The problem is the subdomain. Allowing people to phish on a subdomain is lending the phisher the credibility of legitimate websites hosted on the domain. It’s like lending a thief your uniform so that he can disguise himself as an employee. You’re an accomplice when he uses it to steal.
  - eToThePiIPower 8y ago
    I have to disagree. A phishing scam from "billing.foo.com" would be much harder to spot than one from "user-content.foo.com/billing". Especially if the user has free reign over the style + content. If the user is going to be able to design + style the pages any way they want, having something in the URL to indicate it's still user content is important.

hbosch 8y ago

The timing of this is an amazing coincidence — I recently “lost” my domain in the same way. I bought it originally on Namecheap but have since transferred all my domains into a singular Google Domains account. My main domain, where I have my personal site and all my important emails, disappeared without notice on Wednesday the 9th last week. No expiration notice sent, no information as to what had happened. I contacted Google as soon as I noticed and hey have been alright to deal with. Fortunately I am a Gsuite customer. I had to pay a fee to renew and another fee to restore, which was over $100. It’s been in “restoration” mode, ie offline, for days now and I am unable to even touch the DNS records until it’s back. I’ve already lost a week of uptime with zero recourse. FWIW I use a .co domain, and my site was throwing (for 24hrs or so) a splash page saying the domain was suspended. Eagerly awaiting for it to come back but I’m totally in the dark as to timing.

creeble 8y ago
Did the domain expire, or was there some other issue? I just transferred some .com domains to Google from Name.com, I hope these expiry problems are limited to non- .com TLDs...
- Alupis 8y ago
  I've always received multiple emails from them leading up to a domain expiration. Not easy to miss, unless your whois email contact isn't current. (Google Domains gives you free whois privacy, but they use that contact for notifications)
  - anothergoogler 8y ago
    I get so many emails from Google leading up to and after expiration it's a nuisance. As for parent's issue, I think if you let your domain expire that's 100% on you.
    - jethro_tell 8y ago
      Yeah it's hard to feel bad when they start warning you 90 days in advance

jiveturkey 8y ago

thought this would be another idiotic story but it’s actually valuable. still, some blame falls in their shoulders, cutting it so close. anyway: use mark monitor. don’t know if they do .io though.

judge2020 8y ago
While they did cut it close for looking at renewal status, based on the following quote from the article, I can infer that the domain was set to auto-renew: > I knew our domain should be renewed about these dates, and we were already billed for this renewal.

alexandernst 8y ago

Related - https://medium.com/@alexandernst/from-successful-to-zero-thanks-to-namecheap-d392c76b2ffd https://medium.com/@alexandernst/from-successful-to-zero-tha...

justherefortart 8y ago
TL;DR: Don't use namecheap.com either.

csdreamer7 8y ago

Never heard of domain.com. If anyone wants a recommendation I use namecheap and have never had a problem. They are supporters of the EFF and Net Neutrality. Edit: If you are going to downvote, state why. Namecheap is a good service for a good price and supports Internet freedom. When even GoDaddy was supporting SOPA Namecheap took a stand against SOPA.

tux1968 8y ago
Namecheap online support is seriously kick-butt great. Only complaint is that they don't support Letsencrypt certificates with their web hosting plans.
- csdreamer7 8y ago
  Yeah, I noticed that. What did they used to charge before Letsencrypt? $20?
- minimaul 8y ago
  And yet, my experience with namecheap support was terrible. Screwed up the glue on the main domain in use for email, and after a week they still hadn’t resolved it. I fixed it by moving elsewhere. Edit: the lesson I learned from this was - don’t use a bargain basement company for one of your company’s most important assets.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ingenium 8y ago
I use Namecheap and I generally like them. However I was having a repeat issue for several months using them for DNS with DNSSEC enabled. Basically, validation would fail because they'd let their records expire and "forget" to resign them. I'd notice my domains failing to resolve, and had to manually create a new record and delete it to force all my records to be resigned. Support seemed clueless, and I stumbled across this workaround by accident. I opened multiple support tickets with them, and each time the issue would re-appear in 1-3 months. Went on for probably a year or so and I was just about to move to a different DNS provider when it stopped happening.

cremp 8y ago

I had some fun with NameCheap and the xyz tlds. Turns out, CentralNic (who actually runs the zones) was not doing proper validation on the glue records, and not removing old ones. NameCheap was sending CentralNic cached records, and managed to foobar my domain glues. I bypassed NameCheap, because I knew they weren't the ones actually maintaining the records (registrars are just middle-men.) Using the DNS contact in the SOA, I got a response within 12 hours, and it was fully resolved within 24 hours (minus propagation.) CentralNic contacted NameCheap, as did I, and they got their system fixed within the week. --Edit-- CentralNic, not Nic. The roots were to nic.xyz.

madengr 8y ago

Back in the late 90's before it was Verisign (I can't recall the name), my domain registration could only be changed with an email from my domain. Of course I didn't have my domain up since I switched ISP and had to move my DNS and mail server. Catch 22; what a cluster fuck. Weeks of phone calls with no resolutions. I was going to Virginia anyway, so I physically showed up at Verisign (I wanted to bring a baseball bat), and explained it to the lady at the front desk. She came back with an engineer who fixed it in 5 minutes. As a side note, had to do something similar with Garmin. They kept sending me GPS units with horizontal LCD polarization, when vertical is the standard for sun glasses. Showed up and told the clerk to put on my sunglasses and turn her head sideways to her LCD monitor. "Oh yeah, I see". She fetched an engineer, and 1 week later had a GPS with correct polarization. Sometimes it takes a physical presence; baseball bat optional.

ballenf 8y ago
I'm so happy for OLED phones so I can use GPS in either orientation without severe distortion/dimming.
gm-conspiracy 8y ago
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/
- madengr 8y ago
  Exactly. One of my favorite movies.
- tsomctl 8y ago
  With that advertisement for Spider Man, that's the last time I ever click an IMDB link.
gist 8y ago
> before it was Verisign (I can't recall the name) NetworkSolutions.com > so I physically showed up at Verisign (I wanted to bring a baseball bat) Did you think to write a simple postal letter to them (say a VP or the CEO) rather than get angry enough to show up with a bat? Or send Fedex? Sure you shouldn't have to do that but from a practical angle it may have paid to do that.

woodruffw 8y ago

I used a free domain coupon from domain.com a few years ago, and was spammed with both snail mail and robocalls (advertising services for the domain) for months afterwards. I don't know whether they're selling customer data or what, but it left me with a very negative image of their company.

gist 8y ago
> I don't know whether they're selling customer data or what, but it left me with a very negative image of their company. Whois is public and has always been as required by ICANN. If you don't understand how things work then be fair and don't blame what you think is the obvious cause or reason. There are valid reasons for whois being public and all registrars have this in their agreement and it is widely known.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  I know how WHOIS works. The letters were sent to my academic address, not the professional address I disclosed to WHOIS.
- tacon 8y ago
  Whois is going dark shortly for at least six months, and maybe forever, due to GDPR. So much for the public Whois.

OrganicMSG 8y ago

Don't use *.io anyway. The domains are being sold under a very morally dubious arrangement, given the UK kicked all the people off the island of Chagos and gave the domain registration to a private entity. https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/ https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-... The UK government's view of the Chagossians at the time they gave the island to the USA for a military base was apalling: “Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure and who are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius.”

foobarbazetc 8y ago

If you can, just transfer your domains to Google Domains and never worry about shady registrars again. (We also use Dynadot [good], Hexonet [good], Uniregistry [... okay].)

Boulth 8y ago
Uhm, wait, did you just recommend Google with their automated support? Or does Google Domains have better support since you're paying? I'm genuinely curious about that.
joecool1029 8y ago
Terrible idea. While Google's registrar seems ok right now, Google's support is nonexistent when things go wrong. Literally every bit of their support is outsourced to 3rd-party companies that provide no path of escalation. Even the really bad registrars (and there are a ton) usually have some direct support (or resell off enom, which will extort your money for the privilege of bailing you out).
- sebst 8y ago
  That's the point. Domains causes no problems. Only in some weird scenarios, things can become troublesome. In those cases you need a support. In others you don't. If you have a domain registrar with a good support, account the premium you pay as such: a premium for an insurance when things go bad.
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  Plus Google will illegally seize your domain if they don't like you.
Blindedwino 8y ago
I'm curious, what makes you say that Uniregistry is "...okay"?

mhkool 8y ago

I recommend using easydns.com as the registrar and DNS service. Their email helpdesk is fast: <30 minutes. They answer the phone immediately and they are knowledgeable. Phone support is during business hours, but the more expensive packages have 24hour support. And yeah, you need to have a lot of faith to use .io or other new TLDs which are serviced by new companies.

SaltySolomon 8y ago
.io is not a new domain tho, it's the country tld for Indian Ocean.
Ensorceled 8y ago
I use also easydns and hover and have nothing but good things to say about the support for both of these registrars.
- massaman_yams 8y ago
  +1 for Hover. No problems in close to a decade.
- thomk 8y ago
  Same here for hover. Customer support is excellent and emails about expiring or renewing domains are timely.
mkirklions 8y ago
Okay, anyone want to confirm or add other DNS registrars to the "One of the good ones" list? Ive been recommending my friends to do the entire thing through Dreamhost including a WP install. I personally am more technical, and have my domain name from 7 years ago on godaddy. Any suggestions on where I should use? How about my incompetent friends?
- RX14 8y ago
  I've always heard good things about gandi

hk__2 8y ago

Something that scares me regarding domain names is their variable cost. I purchased a .sexy domain for a joke website and its price got raised by +70% less than one year after that, making the joke a lot less appealing. There’s no guarantee that when you purchase a domain name it reasonably stays around that price for years. Build a business on a domain -> the name increase by XX% -> you’re screwed and must pay.

sebst 8y ago
If it's a joke, okay, 70% might hurt. .sexy is about 60-100$ per year. If you've build a business on it, paying double the amount should not hurt. For me the most important thing about this new gTLDs is more about reputation of the gTLD registry. What if these go out of service? I'm pretty sure that there exist a protocol for that case, but I'm also sure that domains in a less popular new gTLD space might get far less protection from ICANN than any non-sponsored gTLD.
- Gustomaximus 8y ago
  > sexy is about 60-100$ per year. If you've build a business on it, paying double the amount should not hurt I feel the issue is the lack of transparency and control. Who is to say some registrar won't start charging people per visit or % revenue in the future?
  - sebst 8y ago
    Sure, I hear you. If it's a registrar, it's okay, simply change it. For a registry, I believe that they would risk their mass market business cases, but I'm also very sceptical about those ngTLDs for that reason.
Kelbit 8y ago
Avoid the new gTLDs. Most are mismanaged crap. The gTLD system was the greedist and worst decision ICANN ever made. Stick with tried and true domains - ideally .com, but your country's ccTLD is another good choice.

AviationAtom 8y ago

Here's my plug for NameSilo. Try them and you will not regret it.

ai_ja_nai 8y ago

I recall UnitedDomains (German provider) who wanted me in 2016 to fax the request to update the contact information. Fax it. Times are mature for the equivalent of Letsencrypt for registering domains, something like Letsregistrar. We need to have this inefficient industry wiped away since it's really too much manual and too much in the way. If somebody wants to found a noprofit to create a free registrar, I'm 100% in.

reaperducer 8y ago
>I recall UnitedDomains (German provider) who wanted me in 2016 to fax the request to update the contact information. Fax it. I had a similar experience with an Austrian registrar a few years ago. Must be a regional thing, since Austria is Germany's Canada.
- billforsternz 8y ago
  Nice pattern identification. I live in New Zealand and we are Australia's Canada.
sebst 8y ago
> I recall UnitedDomains ... United Domains rely on manual things very for a large part of domain related service processes which are "uncommon" for a private or small domain owner. > If somebody wants to found a noprofit to create a free registrar, I'm 100% in. For the German market I remember the good old times with InternetX before they were bought by United Internet. Had some good talks with their tech support back then. A "free" registrar is maybe not the right solution. The key is "care" for your domain. Take your example of "letsencrypt". They exist because they automate everything. They don't "care" if your certificate causes troubles, they'd just fix their API. With domain registrars the story is different: You need a good support to prevent fraud, you need a good contact to registries if something goes wrong. Key learning here is: In 99% of the cases with domains, everything is fine. But if you find yourself in the 1% where trouble occurs, you need immediate support of competent people. Not sure if this is a case for a "community" or "free" registrar. More a business case for MarkMonitor without the Brand Protection: Simply a domain registrar who cares.

tobltobs 8y ago

I always wonder how people care about "good prices" if they choose a registrar. Quite often the domain name is the most valuable asset of your company. As long as you are not a domain squatter you shouldn't care about if you pay $10 or $1000 per year. And if possible register the name for the next 10 years in advance.

ddtaylor 8y ago
I agree, but not all domains are fully fledged corporate entities - some of us just throw together fun things randomly and for that it's nice to have an $0.88 TLD.

sudouser 8y ago

nearlyfreespeech.net provide great service, notifications and overall highly recommended. been customer with several domains transferred or registered with them over the past tears

jwilk 8y ago
They don't support registering ccTLDs, such as .io: https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/domainregistration/tlds#tlds https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/domainregistration/...

tcarn 8y ago

You'd have a fantastic case for a lawsuit against them. Good job keeping a paper trail.

gwbas1c 8y ago

I transferred two domains from Ghandi to Lunarpages over a decade ago. Somehow, Ghandi's anonymization service was still enabled, and as a result, my domains were blocked a few months ago. Took about a week for Lunarpages to straighten out. (BTW, the spam calls started immediately after Lunarpages fixed the problem. It's a great thing that the EU finally twisted ICANN's arm over this issue.)

davidgh 8y ago

I recall a time when a company I had association with lost their main domains due to a failed renewal. In this case it was a long-term employee who left the company that had loads of company bills going to his card. He cancelled the card sometime after he left and the domains were not renewed. I’m not sure where the renewal failure emails were going but probably some unmonitored admin email box. These were very important domains. Without them, this $1 billion+ company immediately lost all of its ability to generate revenue. It was quite shocking. The problem was discovered when users started getting the registrar’s landing pages rather than the company website pages. It was fixed relatively quickly once identified but do to DNS propagation took about 48 hours for complete resolution. During the window unrecoverable revenue well into the hundreds of thousands was lost. It seems to me that a domain renewal is always a risk, even with a highly reliable registrar. A good defense is to limit the renewals for important domains by registering them for as long as possible (10 years). Even then you have a weak spot because your credit card will be expired by then so you should back that up with a calendar reminder a few months prior to renewal to make sure everything is set.

crooked-v 8y ago
Personally, I'd rather have a corporate domain be renewed once per year and have a defined process for it (e.g. literally have a binder somewhere listing all the details, and put reviewing it on a checklist of other yearly legal and financial tasks) than have it be forgotten about for 10 years at a time.
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  I've set it up before to have 10y which is the max, and renew for 1 year every year. So the domain always has a lead time of 9-10 years but it is still renewed once a year for practice. for most domains thats like 100 bucks to lock it down for 10 years. You can also monitor the domain expiry in your monitoring system i.e. nagios or whatever you are using.
  - imhoguy 8y ago
    Great idea!

dylanpyle 8y ago

I had a related issue where a previous registrar — who we had moved away from months before — managed to accidentally "claw back" and disable our domain due to a misconfigured billing script. The fragility of the whole ecosystem is pretty scary. Wrote it up on Medium @ https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-internet-together-12118be60ff1 https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-inte...

petercooper 8y ago

I had similar beef with a .io domain name many years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973704

damieng 8y ago

Do not rely on other people to resolve time-sensitive issues when you can easily avoid it. In this particular case as soon as it's clear the domain hasn't renewed despite being billed then manually renew it using the usual user interface, pay the extra $10 and then contact support after to get one of the charges refunded now the time-sensitivity is gone. The stress alone isn't worth being out of pocket $10 let alone only for a week or two.

teraflop 8y ago
According to one of the comments in the support ticket (at the end of the article) the registrar did not allow manually renewing the domain.
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  I believe that's true, I think the point stands though, when you realize a shit storm is coming, that's the right time to open your umbrella. Waiting until you've been out of business for three days is a little late. I probably wouldn't stick around as a customer, not because they got screwed here but because they stood there with their hands on their head and watched the train wreck. That's the difference between amateurs and pros (and the pros learned this the hard way)

theoh 8y ago

Yep. "“Sunkenness” refers to the fact that intangible assets tend to have little or no market value, unlike, say, land or a factory. They have value as part of their owner’s business, but not to anybody else. This means that investment in intangible assets is risky." https://www.ft.com/content/a01e7262-d35a-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5f44 https://www.ft.com/content/a01e7262-d35a-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5...

pascalxus 8y ago

For those who want the short version: Never EVER use domain.com as your domain registrar. Yikes! i really feel bad for those guys at uptimechecker.io

jlarocco 8y ago

I'm not sure the domain registrar is completely at fault here. If your website going down will "kill your business" then it's a good idea to use a reputable one and not the cheapest you can find. And looking at domain.com just now, they don't seem to offer .io domains, so I wonder how he even got the domain there?

wycy 8y ago

They might have completely shut you out with the silent treatment because they think you might sue. So maybe you should.

belorn 8y ago

Big domain registrars operates usually on such a low profit margins that a single support ticket cost more than that customer will ever create in revenue. This create a very clear incentive models to focus on growth and keeping support costs down. I work at a smaller registrar and we usually close (resolve) tickets within minutes and as a policy under the hour. We depend on word of mouth and contacts for sale, so we kind of have the opposite incentive model. I may be biased but I recommend avoiding the race to the bottom registrars for business critical domains.

DenisM 8y ago
Given that you’re in the industry perhaps you could list both yourself and your best, most reliable competitors. It’ll benefit all of you. And all of us.

flurdy 8y ago

Domain registrar and DNS for a company are too critical and fragile to go cheap on. For personal, hobby, one-off marketing domains; sure go cheap. But for something you earn money from? Go with highy recommended providers. Registrars with a secure administration, good track record of customer service, high reliability, etc. Also spread the risk around. Don't have domain, DNS, and services with one provider. E.g. register domain with Gandhi, Hover etc, use DNS from Cloudflare, Route56, etc, and host with GCP, Heroku etc (for example). And use several providers if you have multiple domains in case one implodes. That way not all of your domains disappears overnight. And as many have mentioned already on this topic: Have well documented, well practised renewal processes, and renew for multiple years if possible.

mmt 8y ago
> And use several providers if you have multiple domains in case one implodes. I'd add only on refinement: if possible, use domains with different top-level (national) authorities. Sadly, this kind of operational wisdom is rapidly being lost by the emphasis on hiring "DevOps" engineers, with most of the emphasis on the "Dev" part, since they're often just coders against cloud APIs, with much less value placed on traditional sysadmin (or what ended up being called operations engineering during and after the dot-com boom) experience. Now, of course, that makes sense not to hire a full-time 100% sysadmin if what you (think you) need is a 5% (or less) sysadmin. Also, most startups, and probably even larger businesses, are going to be easily lulled into complacency by the uptime records of the larger vendors (or really just AWS), when following the best practices for technical reliability. "Infrastructure as code" is supposed to alleviate the human/administrative risk, and I'm actually convinced that it does to a very large degree (just at a huge cost in markup/profit for Amazon for that infrastructure).

bluedonuts 8y ago

We spend lot of time thinking about making our services resilient against failure at the infrastructure level yet the domain registrar is often overlooked. Not only do you have to worry about them making a technical mistake there is also the risk of a phishing attack. A while back I did a bit of research about what was the most reliable registrar and the only one that i could find was Markmonitor. Most of the big sites (google.com facebook.com etc) use them. They offer lots of cool features that i had never heard of like registrar level locking and custom 'protocols' (like a phonecall from X no. of authorised people) to validate a change. Plus some others that seemed less interesting (to me) such as the brand protection. They do of course charge a pretty penny. From memory there was a minimum cost of $30k per year which allowed you pretty much as many domains as you might want and the promise of being able to get ahold of a human if something goes wrong.

gotrythis 8y ago

None of the .ly domain registrars have auto-renew. They have an option to send you a yearly invoice and a link to login, which they call "auto-renew", but it doesn't actually take the all-important step of renewing. Lost a great domain because of that.

giobox 8y ago

This is one of the potential drawbacks of using ccTLDs like .io - individual nations are afforded much more control in the administration and dispute resolution process than gTLDs. Unfortunately some are run more poorly than others, which is why in this case the support agent states: "Unlike common domain names [gTLDs] like .com or .nets. .IO's are managed by a specific organization, that manages only .IO domain names..." .IO of course being the ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory, run by these chaps: http://www.icb.co.uk/ http://www.icb.co.uk/ At any rate, it's worth bearing in mind that ccTLDs are not administered the same way as a gTLD, and weird issues like this that are a pain to resolve can happen.

busterarm 8y ago
And every couple of years someone finds this out the hard way and goes on a big rant like this one. Particularly with the .IO ccTLD. Or .LY. It tells me that the person running the business isn't very good at estimating the business risk of the technology they're using. That's when I start hoping I'm not a customer of theirs and invariably find out that I'm not. Phew.

DenisM 8y ago

So, how does one prepare for the worst? Let’s brainstorm: 0. Register alternative domains in advance with a different registrar. 1. Setup mailing list for all registered users and be prepared to blast them with a new domain. 2. Make mobile apps check both the main and the alternative domains. 3. Make the mobile app notify the user of a new domain name requirement via push notification and the like. 4. Setup the phone system so that it can read the new domain before connecting support. 5. Setup support on a different domain (e.g. zen desk). If zendesk goes down users will know to call us, if the main site goes down they may remember to check zendesk. 6...?

maaark 8y ago
-1. Choose a domain registrar & TLD not known to be fishy or incompetent (so not .io)

sammy241 8y ago

DON'T GET SCAMMED!!!... I am a single mother of 2 boys, I needed a loan to pay for tuition fees for my sons but had negative listings and bad credit records which was caused by my strugglings to make ends meet since lost my husband to cancer. I needed a way out. I contacted over 4 different hackers which I got ripped off even though i told them about my situation and that i was also widow. They were still heartless and took my money without rendering the services they promised to. I thank God for my sister who introduced me to a hacker of hers who could help. We contacted him and with a reasonable amount of money my bad listings were flushed out in a week. It felt like magic as i remember shedding tears of joy on that very day. Contact him if you need such service at QUADHACKED(at)GMAIL(com)COM. He is the only one i trust.

eightturn 8y ago

This sorta reminds me of when Regions Bank forgot to renew its domain name.. for everything a smart business can do to acquire customers, developing groundbreaking software, etc - sometimes the things that break are the most obvious and mundane.. https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/regions-bank-fails-to-renew-domain-name-web-site-goes-down/ https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/regions-bank-fails-to-rene...

berbec 8y ago

Pardon my ignorance, but this is something I've always wondered. You can setup fail over DNS servers, just list different DNS servers, possibly from different companies, with your registrar. Is the registrar a unavoidable single-point of failure? Your multiple name servers are listed with your one-and-only-one registrar, no matter what?

txsh 8y ago
This wasn’t a technical problem with the domain. The DNS changed because op’s registrar failed to renew the domain. The website was working intermittently because of propagation, not a server issue. Problems like this are why registrars renew domains a month before they expire. The way to avoid these issues is to check to see if your domain renews on time. If your registrar fails to renew it, you have ample time to transfer it to another registrar.
- berbec 8y ago
  I understand it wasn't a technical problem. I was wondering if it was possible to have a backup listing of your nameservers in some fashion?

lopmotr 8y ago

I don't know if this is a culture thing or personal style, but the author keeps emphasizing that the story is true. To me, that reduces credibility since I've often heard false stories whose narrators reiterated their truthfulness unexpectedly when I wasn't doubting them. Not very reliable logic, I know, but it's a small warning bell.

txsh 8y ago

Mistakes and glitches happen. Op should have noticed their domain did not renew a month before it expired, not just before. DNS and domain propagation are slow turning ships. If a problem occurs, you sometimes need days to straighten out the problems. > I tried to set nameservers to correct values, but Control panel returned error: uptimechekcer.io is not managed here! They misspelled their own domain in this article. It seems their problem is a lack of attention to detail. The complaint about charging for domain registration is nonsense. Domain registrations are non-refundable. If a registrar ever registered domains for customers before payment, they’d quickly find themselves out of business. Payment is always up front across the industry.

nodesocket 8y ago

If this service was some run of the mill e-commerce or SaaS I wouldn't have this reaction, but being a critical monitoring service that was down for days, this reflects very poorly on them. My reaction is that I'd never use uptimechecker.io. Quite honestly I am baffled why they'd even want to write this post for others unaware of their company and the outage to discover. It does not reflect well on them, despite spinning it and rightly blaming domain.com. Just use a respected and well known registrar such as Amazon Route 53 domains. This could have all been avoided. I know the blame "should" fall on domain.com, but ultimately startups are responsible for their service.

adventist 8y ago
Wasn't their fault. Their users deserve to know exactly what happened. I value transparency.
- nodesocket 8y ago
  Absolutely, send your current customers an e-mail explaining... Just not convinced a public blog post is good business for them moving forward.

lowtto 8y ago

Yes I've heard of domain.com . In fact, we even used it for one of our products. We tried to purchase wildcard ssl via their control panel - the result was a delay from our go live schedule by as much as more than a week. It was the most horrible control panel I've ever used honestly. Feels like bug from the alpha release candidate V1 bugs list. there's this weird bug when it suddenly delete all our mailboxes for no reason. The moment we saw that bug we immediately stop using it. The support? The first guy that tends to you will always be the most stupidest one. You almost always had to insist to get/ be forwarded to a senior level support with actual brain. tl;dr Stay 100 miles away from domain.com . By the way it wasn't me that chose domain.com . I would never buy from any website that looks like this.

pawal 8y ago

For a very long time, DNS simply has not been an identified risk for most corporations. In the risk analysis they make, DNS is not on the map at all, even though it may be a single point of complete collapse for them. Thus we see extremely large corporations depending on a single DNS provider, using a registrar that are more interested in profit rather than resilience against attacks, no DNSSEC. Etc etc. This is slowly changing. What is. Not changing fast enough is the ability to run more than one DNS provider, giving you yet another spof.

ek750 8y ago

This is an interesting discussion, as I’ve recently run into problems with transferring a domain from domain.com to google domains. I’ve heard good things about google domains in the past and the price seemed right (never had a problem with domain.com, but they charge separately for domain privacy) and now I’m stuck in Vonnegut-like situation. They locked my account because apparently the record that was transferred in doesn’t exactly match my uploaded govt ID. I can’t/won’t change my legal name, and the account is locked so I can’t fix the record. The phone support was sympathetic but said I had to go through email, which I’m pretty sure is an AI. This has been going on for a month now, and I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get this resolved. I haven’t seen any discussion or experiences people have with AWS route 53. Is that a valid option? Seems reasonable and has privacy included.

hellweaver666 8y ago

I worked at a domain registrar for over ten years. Every day I would have to deal with a call from some irate customer who's business was down because they forgot to renew the domain. This was after we would send them emails, starting a month before the renewal was due and then more frequently the closer they got to the renewal date. Many times they wouldn't even notice until the domain had passed the grace period, fully expired and been snatched up by some scalper and replaced with adverts. Then they would be on the phone claiming to be losing thousands of pounds for every minute the website was offline and how it needed to be resolved right now or they would be sending in their lawyers. If your business resolves around having a functional website, make sure you have a solid domain renewal plan in place and are hosting with a trustworthy registrar.

dheera 8y ago
> This was after we would send them emails Did your e-mails look like spam by any chance? e.g. contain images, look like newsletters, contain tracking pixels, etc. -- most such e-mails get auto-deleted on my end.

risratorn 8y ago

The whole domain registration system is a very complex and messy area to work with, both from a development as an enduser perspective. I speak from experience working at a hosting company implementing domain registrations directly with the registry systems. It's a incomprehensible mishmash of tld's implementing different methods of registering, renewing, restoring, domains. Some require ID verification before registrations, some have a quarantine of 1 week, other of 4 weeks, some no quarantine. Some domains need to be renewed before expiry, some can still be used 2 weeks after expiry, some domains allow transfers and trades, others don't or do under strict circumstances. Some require transfer codes, others don't. Some transfer codes are valid for 1 week, some are valid for longer. There is no decent standarization on the technical level when it comes to managing domain registrations. There is the EPP protocol but almost none of the registries implement a standardized way of registering domains each implementing a mess of extensions to suit their bureaucratic needs. ICANN introducing over 1.2k new gTLD's some time ago also didn't help along with the introcution of domains containing non standard latin characters and the puny-code implementation there (eg: café.com is actually listed as xn--caf-dma.com) I'm not trying to defend domain.com who obviously failed to deliver on the basics of decent support, but things like this (issues between domain vendor and registry) happen more than most of us like to admit.

ahje 8y ago

I work for a domain registrar, albeit not the one mentioned in the article. Obviously, we see a lot of expired domains on a daily basis, mainly because customer's forget to renew despite us reminding them repeatedly during the three months before the domains expire. General advice: 1) Make sure there is more than one single contact person for invoicing. All too often, the problem is that a single employee is unavailable for some reason and that the rest of the business have no idea that the domain needs to be renewed. 2) Keep the contact details valid and up-to-date. This should be a no-brainer but a surprisingly large amount of businesses have domains registered to single employees, or with invalid contact emails. 3) Don't wait until the domains expire; renew the domains for at least one additional year. It will give you a whole year to fix stuff if you forget a reminder. EDIT: Or if the registrar screws up like in this case. 4) Automatic renewals is your friend. It's a last line of defense if all else fails. 5) Make sure you have a process for handling all of the above, even if you're a one-man business. Domain names are often critical for the business, and it's ridiculous to let the entire business rely upon a reminder sent 90 days before expiry.

pmlnr 8y ago
They payed for the renewal in time. The registrar didn't forward it "in time", which is apparently a requirement from .io.
- ahje 8y ago
  In this case, the registrar obviously screwed up. Still, if the domain had been renewed for an additional year already, the domain would not have been expired. As sad as it may seem, you need to take other people's incompetence into account when you're dealing with business-critical things like domain names.
  - pmlnr 8y ago
    The domain was paid, the registrar took the money, but .io didn't renew it, because they need the renewal notice at least 3 days prior to expiry. It was a registrar screw up, but my main take away is: avoid .io like plague. See also: https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-production-traffic-b6aa17eeac20 https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...

FrozenVoid 8y ago

There are 100 year domains renewals/registrations if anyone wonders. So if they really wanted to safeguard it, they could of done it. https://www.networksolutions.com/domain-name-registration/popup-100-yr-term.jsp https://www.networksolutions.com/domain-name-registration/po... https://www.tonic.to/faq.htm#12 https://www.tonic.to/faq.htm#12

chmod775 8y ago

Yes well. Don't use .io domains for anything serious. I had one of the 20 largest .io domains for a time, until they shut us down because they received one complaint in 3 years. It took them 2 days after we resolved the matter to put the domain back online as well. By that time I had already migrated to .org - which is run by a considerably more professional non-profit organization.

ataturk 8y ago

At my job, if I told the story like that, I'd be told "I'm being too negative."

maxehmookau 8y ago

A lot of domain registrars seem to go for the "pile it high, sell it cheap" business model. I think as with any other commodity that a tech business (or any business!) needs to run, you pick your suppliers carefully. In the UK, I wouldn't touch 123Reg with a stick because I know their support is terrible. I would however use Gandi or AWS as I know their support is decent.

prasanthmj 8y ago

ICANN should make it mandatory for the domain registrars to send reminders at least 1 month before expiry.

rakibtg 8y ago

I had similar experience with domain.com Their support team is from India, and they took a week to solve the issue. I am looking for good domain service provider to transfer all of my domains 30+ Any recommendations? We use Digitalocean as the hosting service provider

aheppy 8y ago
I've used Namecheap for many years and have found them very reliable and their customer service responsive.

josefresco 8y ago

I create websites for small businesses. I've seen almost every conceivable domain renewal failure in my 20 years of experience. No matter how many times we remind clients to get this aspect of their business documented we still have sites go down every year. We charge a fee to "manage" domains for those who opt-in, solely for this reason (and it's worth it). The most common reasons: Bad contact email Auto renew off Expired CC Lost password The more obscure: Bought domain through a reseller who is now out of business (more common than you think) "Branded" contact email which post expiration, no longer works. Disgruntled "losing" webmaster who registered domain under his/her account and is now holding it hostage.

moistoreos 8y ago

Just to be fair, this person waited until 3 days before expiration to verify that everything was ok with his registrar. They should have done this 90 days ago. Create and implement a business policy to have IT come up with a procedure to check this quarterly. There's no really any excuse for a tech company to have this happen.

ivan78 8y ago

On my previous job we had to manage thousands of customer domains, including annual renewal. This was very tedious task, so I wrote a Perl script, scraping WHOIS and DNS data for all domains listed on our DNS servers. Based on this data every domain was assigned a status, such as "Ok", "misconfigured", "about to expire", "points to foreign DNS server" or "points to foreign Web server". This script was scheduled to run every other day and sent CSV report (full and diff from previous run) to a person responsible for domain renewal. Needless to say, our support specialists were very happy with this improvement.