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I personally found a period of 1-2 year to be the absolute worst. On the next cycle the man is gone because it's past the average tenure. The emails about it we

I personally found a period of 1-2 year to be the absolute worst. On the next cycle the man is gone because it's past the average tenure. The emails about it were lost or auto deleted. Any documentation or process is useless because the company or the supplier has changed. To have a process be remembered, make it monthly or quarterly.

mkopinsky 8y ago
How can you make domain renewals be monthly or quarterly?
- gpm 8y ago
  If you have multiple domains you could renew them at seperate times. Has the advantage that a failure might not be so disastrous either.
  - eli 8y ago
    Only if you had the foresight to register them at different times, right?
    - jethro_tell 8y ago
      Not necessarily, most registrars will let you renew for a full year or more at any time. Buy both on the same day, set a reminder or open a ticket to renew only one domain in 3/6 mo. Also, get a registrar with an API and use a script to figure out how long a domain is valid. Alarm through your monitoring system when you hit the too close for comfort time frame. You can scrape whois as well but that seems fragile.
- dspillett 8y ago
  The monthly process isn't necessarily to renew domains - it is to assess the situation to see if there are any that need renewing soon. Many months nothing will need doing, a couple of months per year something will need action. Even as a small company we have a number of regular infrastructure reviews. Most of the time we just go through the review, find nothing has changed unexpectedly and no new ideas need bringing to the table, we sign off to say all looks well, and the prices takes very little time. Some of this is automated: scripts collate and report information for signoff and we humans verify the result and take actions as needed (in some cases the action needed is to update the script(s)). This may seem wasteful, but a couple of people spending a couple of hours total per month on such checks can save some nasty surprises in future. Domain status checks is one of the things that gets reviewed.
walrus01 8y ago
This is why it's important to use job scheduler software, admined by a NOC, to generate your own internal reminder emails set for a specific date and time in the future. The process of renewing a domain or buying anything that requires renewal should include a step to create the future reminder job. This is vastly more powerful than you need to simply call a shell script which generates SMTP email to your noc@companyname.com address, but can serve the purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JobScheduler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JobScheduler You can use this for all sorts of things like maintenance notifications, automated emails to a facilities group on N schedule to change air conditioning filters, whatever needs to occur on a specific recurring time schedule.
- kijin 8y ago
  It's also important that these notifications are sent to an address that is permanently assigned to a role, e.g. noc@company.com, rather than to any particular person, e.g. steve@company.com. Steve might not be there the next time those domains come up for renewal. The same rule applies to any email address that you use to purchase and renew domains and other critical services. If renewal emails are being sent to someone who doesn't work there anymore, something is very wrong.

mkopinsky 8y ago

How can you make domain renewals be monthly or quarterly?

gpm 8y ago
If you have multiple domains you could renew them at seperate times. Has the advantage that a failure might not be so disastrous either.
- eli 8y ago
  Only if you had the foresight to register them at different times, right?
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    Not necessarily, most registrars will let you renew for a full year or more at any time. Buy both on the same day, set a reminder or open a ticket to renew only one domain in 3/6 mo. Also, get a registrar with an API and use a script to figure out how long a domain is valid. Alarm through your monitoring system when you hit the too close for comfort time frame. You can scrape whois as well but that seems fragile.
dspillett 8y ago
The monthly process isn't necessarily to renew domains - it is to assess the situation to see if there are any that need renewing soon. Many months nothing will need doing, a couple of months per year something will need action. Even as a small company we have a number of regular infrastructure reviews. Most of the time we just go through the review, find nothing has changed unexpectedly and no new ideas need bringing to the table, we sign off to say all looks well, and the prices takes very little time. Some of this is automated: scripts collate and report information for signoff and we humans verify the result and take actions as needed (in some cases the action needed is to update the script(s)). This may seem wasteful, but a couple of people spending a couple of hours total per month on such checks can save some nasty surprises in future. Domain status checks is one of the things that gets reviewed.

walrus01 8y ago

This is why it's important to use job scheduler software, admined by a NOC, to generate your own internal reminder emails set for a specific date and time in the future. The process of renewing a domain or buying anything that requires renewal should include a step to create the future reminder job. This is vastly more powerful than you need to simply call a shell script which generates SMTP email to your noc@companyname.com address, but can serve the purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JobScheduler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JobScheduler You can use this for all sorts of things like maintenance notifications, automated emails to a facilities group on N schedule to change air conditioning filters, whatever needs to occur on a specific recurring time schedule.

kijin 8y ago
It's also important that these notifications are sent to an address that is permanently assigned to a role, e.g. noc@company.com, rather than to any particular person, e.g. steve@company.com. Steve might not be there the next time those domains come up for renewal. The same rule applies to any email address that you use to purchase and renew domains and other critical services. If renewal emails are being sent to someone who doesn't work there anymore, something is very wrong.