7 ms·

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 suppo

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
  - xapata 8y ago
    Differs by product. I got excellent support for my Pixel.
  - ballenf 8y ago
    Paid gsuite has live 24/7 phone support. I've used 5-6 times over 8 years and gotten 5-star service every single time. Haven't needed to call them in the past 18 mos. or so, however, and these things can change. I have gripes about aspects of gsuite itself, in particular how they've removed a few features that I used from the $5/user/mo tier. Had to move to $10 tier to keep email content filtering (ability to use regex to prevent accidental SSN or CC inclusion). The filtering setup is much easier to use now, but the old system worked well enough.
    - joecool1029 8y ago
      >Paid gsuite has live 24/7 phone support. I've used 5-6 times over 8 years and gotten 5-star service every single time. I've been a reseller for most of the decade and I can honestly say in all the times we've called, we have never had a single issue corrected by support. We usually end up having to find workarounds for bugs. The last time was an autosuspension our panel(s - there are two versions now) would not let us un-suspend the client. This left him without email for a week, while support would only respond during the early AM hours, and would repeatedly ask us to prove identity, even though we were registered resellers with admin panel access. In all the years of working with different vendors, I honestly cannot think of a single one with a 0% success rate in their support.
      - mjcl 8y ago
        Office 365 is pretty close to that, actually. You need Premier support to get anything useful. My favorite O365 support story is where first level support dicked around so long with a missing mailbox that by the time they escalated the ticket, their backup had been overwritten. Luckily it was a user’s archive mailbox and we still had their source PSTs, so not a lot was lost.
        joecool1029 8y ago
        > Office 365 is pretty close to that, actually. You need Premier support to get anything useful. I haven't had too much experience with their service support, but their app support seemed decent. I was having an issue with S/MIME signatures not being parsed properly on Outlook iOS. Support chat seemed competent and knew what was happening (no support for S/MIME signatures yet).
- curun1r 8y ago
  You don't have to go all the way to $1k+/yr to get much more piece of mind. For well under $100/yr, EasyDNS offers fantastic support. My go-to example of their customer service philosophy: A number of years ago, there was some problem in the electric grid that resulted in power outages over most of the Eastern US and Canada. In response to just their customer service being unavailable for 1 hr during the much longer outage (their production services were unaffected), they offered me a partial refund without me even knowing what had happened. I didn't take it. Usual disclaimer: Not affiliated with them in any way other than as a satisfied customer for more than a decade.
  - bedatadriven 8y ago
    Ditto. Very happy with EasyDNS these last 6 years. Had some wierd renewal issue 3 years ago similar to what the OP described but had someone on the phone immediately and the problem was resolved within the hour.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  For $1000 you could preregister a domain for a century though.
zzzcpan 8y ago
Even the most reputable tried and true do not guarantee anything. They can and will kick you out on a whim. You can still mitigate the risk though. Use multiple domains in all marketing materials from different tlds and different registrars. Use regional domains. Have alternative ways to communicate with your customers. It's all very basic stuff. Merely thinking about it gets you far. Most people don't even think about it and blindly rely on centralized services: domain registrars, dns providers, cdn providers, single hosting/cloud provider, etc.
- annamargot 8y ago
  Would you mind providing some details on this approach? Multiple domains in marketing materials sounds like it would create confusion among customers. Are you specifically referring to companies with an international presence? Thanks
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    In practice people don't think about or even look at URLs, that's why phishing works. They recognize sites based on logos and stylesheets and often go to places by googling the brand name and clicking on the first link. If you forward every domain to a primary domain at the DNS level, your pagerank probably won't be hurt by this practice.
    - jethro_tell 8y ago
      to go a step further, adding out of band contact info is a big deal. Forward mycompanyname@gmail.com to info@mycompanyname.com and give it out in the emergency support info for support contracts Add it to your status page as needed, (which should be running on someone else's service or mycompanynamestaus.com). Customers that really need your service, like the ones who pay, will check the status page and can update the endpoint as needed. Make sure your sip lines don't point to mycompanyname.com. If you publish a client side app, use 2 domain names as endpoints, mycompanyname.com and mycompanyname.io. Have the app or service check for and fail over if one doesn't work. Make sure paging and technician notification is handled by a system that won't be affected by this. (nothing more amazing then getting 200 pages AFTER you've spent 2 days recovering a total failure of a system. You just want to go to sleep but you have to wait for the email queue to drain since you can't turn your pager off.) Either way, use 2 domain names, and set them to expire at 6 MO intervals. Buy the domain for 2 years (or more) and renew every year so you always have 1-2 year lead time to sort out issues. The list above would probably cost about $200/year and a few extra hours but it keeps you from getting backed into a corner. Everything else in our infrastructures has fail overs, and limited blast radius for failures. We tend to us domain registration as a single point of failure and one one even things about it.
daxorid 8y ago
This is no guarantee. GoDaddy and Google Domains, in particular, have demonstrated willingness to throw you into clientHold hell for political reasons, even for "tried and true TLDs".
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I remember last year how Google, GoDaddy and CloudFlair all threw this one website under the bus: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... The Internet isn't as free as people think it is. Things still need to be hosts and those providers could simply chose to stop hosting you.
  - namibj 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure you can find a DC at either AMS-IX or DE-CIX where the contract won't allow them to kick you out during the politically heated time (i.e. you should find somewhere with a 1y+ term), and iirc both exchanges have, due to their non-profit nature, no ability to kick you out unless your actions are actually illegal. So, unless you get shut down by a court of law (both host countries have them (well, almost, but compared to the US they are great)), you get sufficient bandwidth at those providers. Ofc eyeball networks can blackhole you w.r.t. their customers, but that is a whole different hurdle compared to just refusing to do business on the basis of freedom of contract/freedom of association. Sure it will cost you, about $6k/month for 100Gbits, not including hardware and rackspace. But if you are 'just' concerned with your static website staying online on the clearnet, this should be affordable (i.e., you should be able to host them from ram, and serve up to 600Gbit/s from a 1U AMD Epyc, for like $7k in hardware, not counting the ram (15$/GiB of content you want to host, with a minimum of 32GiB, up to 512GiB getting a discount, and up to 2TiB being possible)). Don't depend critically on companies risking political alignment with you, if what you do has any significant risk due to political association.
  - jchw 8y ago
    >The Daily Stormer, a website with highly controversial hate speech, was recently scrubbed from the Internet. >A store cannot have blacks only and whites only bathrooms or water fountains. It's amazing how someone can unironically defend the plight of a website that they admit produces "highly controversial hate speech" by comparing it indirectly to none other than racial segregation.
justherefortart 8y ago
Used register.com since the 90s. They're so bad I switched 20+ domains to name.com. DO NOT USE web.com or register.com, they're fucking terrible.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  Happy name customer with .io domains that roll over properly. I've used most of the big guys as well (including The Network Solutions).
  - 2RTZZSro 8y ago
    Network Solutions is an utter joke. I had them develop a website and the website was finished with web best practices from 15 years prior. Messy code, zero responsive design. Photoshop used to the max. Then the same website hosted with them was mysteriously "hacked" and disappeared. They had zero backups and continued charging to host the website they lost. Absolutely zero recourse for their incompetence. STAY AWAY
    - MoBattah 8y ago
      Paid via credit card? You can even reverse bank transactions. I do it plenty. Too many organizations are irresponsible.
  - justherefortart 8y ago
    I used Network Solutions when they were the only game in town. Switched to Register in the late 90s. Just stuck with them because I didn't have any issues. In the last 5-10 years the issues started growing. Finally, I hit a wall and transferred everything off their service. I now get spam emails of them trying to trick me into switching my domains back. The vitriol their helpdesk people receive is about as shitty as I get. Maybe they don't deserve it in their role, but hopefully the angry emails will get them to find a better job asap.
LogicX 8y ago
Yes. This is why I use iwantmyname.com
- eythian 8y ago
  I also use them. It's been solid. Also, I used to have beers with the people working there back when I lived in NZ.
giobox 8y ago
> run your production stuff off a .com or country-level equivalent In this case technically they did run from a country-level equivalent, .io is a ccTLD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io Granted no one ever appears to use .io for it's original purpose as the ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory... ccTLD management is delegated to a company in that nation usually. Unfortunately not all of them are equally well managed - I wouldn't consider gTLDs _exactly_ comparable to ccTLDs in this regard. ccTLDs get to differ in pretty key ways from gTLDs, including deciding their own dispute resolution processes (gTLDs all use the UDRP).
- ascorbic 8y ago
  Not particularly surprising, as the BIOT's only residents are the US and UK military, since the UK deported the 1500 Chagossians in the 70s.

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
- xapata 8y ago
  Differs by product. I got excellent support for my Pixel.
- ballenf 8y ago
  Paid gsuite has live 24/7 phone support. I've used 5-6 times over 8 years and gotten 5-star service every single time. Haven't needed to call them in the past 18 mos. or so, however, and these things can change. I have gripes about aspects of gsuite itself, in particular how they've removed a few features that I used from the $5/user/mo tier. Had to move to $10 tier to keep email content filtering (ability to use regex to prevent accidental SSN or CC inclusion). The filtering setup is much easier to use now, but the old system worked well enough.
  - joecool1029 8y ago
    >Paid gsuite has live 24/7 phone support. I've used 5-6 times over 8 years and gotten 5-star service every single time. I've been a reseller for most of the decade and I can honestly say in all the times we've called, we have never had a single issue corrected by support. We usually end up having to find workarounds for bugs. The last time was an autosuspension our panel(s - there are two versions now) would not let us un-suspend the client. This left him without email for a week, while support would only respond during the early AM hours, and would repeatedly ask us to prove identity, even though we were registered resellers with admin panel access. In all the years of working with different vendors, I honestly cannot think of a single one with a 0% success rate in their support.
    - mjcl 8y ago
      Office 365 is pretty close to that, actually. You need Premier support to get anything useful. My favorite O365 support story is where first level support dicked around so long with a missing mailbox that by the time they escalated the ticket, their backup had been overwritten. Luckily it was a user’s archive mailbox and we still had their source PSTs, so not a lot was lost.
      - joecool1029 8y ago
        > Office 365 is pretty close to that, actually. You need Premier support to get anything useful. I haven't had too much experience with their service support, but their app support seemed decent. I was having an issue with S/MIME signatures not being parsed properly on Outlook iOS. Support chat seemed competent and knew what was happening (no support for S/MIME signatures yet).
curun1r 8y ago
You don't have to go all the way to $1k+/yr to get much more piece of mind. For well under $100/yr, EasyDNS offers fantastic support. My go-to example of their customer service philosophy: A number of years ago, there was some problem in the electric grid that resulted in power outages over most of the Eastern US and Canada. In response to just their customer service being unavailable for 1 hr during the much longer outage (their production services were unaffected), they offered me a partial refund without me even knowing what had happened. I didn't take it. Usual disclaimer: Not affiliated with them in any way other than as a satisfied customer for more than a decade.
- bedatadriven 8y ago
  Ditto. Very happy with EasyDNS these last 6 years. Had some wierd renewal issue 3 years ago similar to what the OP described but had someone on the phone immediately and the problem was resolved within the hour.
tinus_hn 8y ago
For $1000 you could preregister a domain for a century though.

zzzcpan 8y ago

Even the most reputable tried and true do not guarantee anything. They can and will kick you out on a whim. You can still mitigate the risk though. Use multiple domains in all marketing materials from different tlds and different registrars. Use regional domains. Have alternative ways to communicate with your customers. It's all very basic stuff. Merely thinking about it gets you far. Most people don't even think about it and blindly rely on centralized services: domain registrars, dns providers, cdn providers, single hosting/cloud provider, etc.

annamargot 8y ago
Would you mind providing some details on this approach? Multiple domains in marketing materials sounds like it would create confusion among customers. Are you specifically referring to companies with an international presence? Thanks
- whatshisface 8y ago
  In practice people don't think about or even look at URLs, that's why phishing works. They recognize sites based on logos and stylesheets and often go to places by googling the brand name and clicking on the first link. If you forward every domain to a primary domain at the DNS level, your pagerank probably won't be hurt by this practice.
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    to go a step further, adding out of band contact info is a big deal. Forward mycompanyname@gmail.com to info@mycompanyname.com and give it out in the emergency support info for support contracts Add it to your status page as needed, (which should be running on someone else's service or mycompanynamestaus.com). Customers that really need your service, like the ones who pay, will check the status page and can update the endpoint as needed. Make sure your sip lines don't point to mycompanyname.com. If you publish a client side app, use 2 domain names as endpoints, mycompanyname.com and mycompanyname.io. Have the app or service check for and fail over if one doesn't work. Make sure paging and technician notification is handled by a system that won't be affected by this. (nothing more amazing then getting 200 pages AFTER you've spent 2 days recovering a total failure of a system. You just want to go to sleep but you have to wait for the email queue to drain since you can't turn your pager off.) Either way, use 2 domain names, and set them to expire at 6 MO intervals. Buy the domain for 2 years (or more) and renew every year so you always have 1-2 year lead time to sort out issues. The list above would probably cost about $200/year and a few extra hours but it keeps you from getting backed into a corner. Everything else in our infrastructures has fail overs, and limited blast radius for failures. We tend to us domain registration as a single point of failure and one one even things about it.

daxorid 8y ago

This is no guarantee. GoDaddy and Google Domains, in particular, have demonstrated willingness to throw you into clientHold hell for political reasons, even for "tried and true TLDs".

djsumdog 8y ago
I remember last year how Google, GoDaddy and CloudFlair all threw this one website under the bus: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... The Internet isn't as free as people think it is. Things still need to be hosts and those providers could simply chose to stop hosting you.
- namibj 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can find a DC at either AMS-IX or DE-CIX where the contract won't allow them to kick you out during the politically heated time (i.e. you should find somewhere with a 1y+ term), and iirc both exchanges have, due to their non-profit nature, no ability to kick you out unless your actions are actually illegal. So, unless you get shut down by a court of law (both host countries have them (well, almost, but compared to the US they are great)), you get sufficient bandwidth at those providers. Ofc eyeball networks can blackhole you w.r.t. their customers, but that is a whole different hurdle compared to just refusing to do business on the basis of freedom of contract/freedom of association. Sure it will cost you, about $6k/month for 100Gbits, not including hardware and rackspace. But if you are 'just' concerned with your static website staying online on the clearnet, this should be affordable (i.e., you should be able to host them from ram, and serve up to 600Gbit/s from a 1U AMD Epyc, for like $7k in hardware, not counting the ram (15$/GiB of content you want to host, with a minimum of 32GiB, up to 512GiB getting a discount, and up to 2TiB being possible)). Don't depend critically on companies risking political alignment with you, if what you do has any significant risk due to political association.
- jchw 8y ago
  >The Daily Stormer, a website with highly controversial hate speech, was recently scrubbed from the Internet. >A store cannot have blacks only and whites only bathrooms or water fountains. It's amazing how someone can unironically defend the plight of a website that they admit produces "highly controversial hate speech" by comparing it indirectly to none other than racial segregation.

justherefortart 8y ago

Used register.com since the 90s. They're so bad I switched 20+ domains to name.com. DO NOT USE web.com or register.com, they're fucking terrible.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jethro_tell 8y ago
Happy name customer with .io domains that roll over properly. I've used most of the big guys as well (including The Network Solutions).
- 2RTZZSro 8y ago
  Network Solutions is an utter joke. I had them develop a website and the website was finished with web best practices from 15 years prior. Messy code, zero responsive design. Photoshop used to the max. Then the same website hosted with them was mysteriously "hacked" and disappeared. They had zero backups and continued charging to host the website they lost. Absolutely zero recourse for their incompetence. STAY AWAY
  - MoBattah 8y ago
    Paid via credit card? You can even reverse bank transactions. I do it plenty. Too many organizations are irresponsible.
- justherefortart 8y ago
  I used Network Solutions when they were the only game in town. Switched to Register in the late 90s. Just stuck with them because I didn't have any issues. In the last 5-10 years the issues started growing. Finally, I hit a wall and transferred everything off their service. I now get spam emails of them trying to trick me into switching my domains back. The vitriol their helpdesk people receive is about as shitty as I get. Maybe they don't deserve it in their role, but hopefully the angry emails will get them to find a better job asap.

LogicX 8y ago

Yes. This is why I use iwantmyname.com

eythian 8y ago
I also use them. It's been solid. Also, I used to have beers with the people working there back when I lived in NZ.

giobox 8y ago

> run your production stuff off a .com or country-level equivalent In this case technically they did run from a country-level equivalent, .io is a ccTLD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io Granted no one ever appears to use .io for it's original purpose as the ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory... ccTLD management is delegated to a company in that nation usually. Unfortunately not all of them are equally well managed - I wouldn't consider gTLDs _exactly_ comparable to ccTLDs in this regard. ccTLDs get to differ in pretty key ways from gTLDs, including deciding their own dispute resolution processes (gTLDs all use the UDRP).

ascorbic 8y ago
Not particularly surprising, as the BIOT's only residents are the US and UK military, since the UK deported the 1500 Chagossians in the 70s.