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How a domain registrar can kill your business

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Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#121
post #92

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 impor…

They got lucky, because if it were me and I left on mild terms I would be invoicing them $50k a year to renew their domain.

You are lucky, because if I ran that company I'd haul your ass in court so quick you wouldn't know what hit you.

The fact that you can doesn't give you a right to do so and in this case it is pretty clear that you would be acting maliciously.

I've seen such 'tricks' up close a couple of times and judges tend to take a very dim view of this kind of behavior.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Great idea!

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#123

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].)

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).

Plus Google will illegally seize your domain if they don't like you.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#124
post #92

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 impor…

> A good defense is to limit the renewals for important domains by registering them for as long as possible (10 years) This is an interesting take. I prefer the opposite approach: choose the shortest possible registration window (1 year), and have a very clearly defined, properly-documented renewal process that multiple people at the company understand. It's unlikely that all of those people leave the company in a 1-…

You could do both. Register it out ten years and each your register an additional one.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#126
post #67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The domain did expire, though I was never made aware of the upcoming expiration. My assumption is that there was some glitch between Namecheap, Google, and the .co domain authority... but I still don’t know exactly how my domain expired so silently. All my other domains were purchased through Google, this one was transferred in. It really was a massive headache. I have no idea how long it would have taken me to notic…

I note my domains expiration dates and renew them at least 30 days before. Your not the only person whose had issues recently with Namecheap not sending renewal emails.

Wasn't Op complaining about Google DNS, not Namecheap? I've never had any notification issues with Namecheap after almost a decade of them managing most of my domains. If anything they over-communicate about expirations and auto-renewals. Auto-renew works well and even after an expiration it's usually easy and fast to get your domain back up.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good defense is to limit the renewals for important domains by registering them for as long as possible (10 years) This is an interesting take. I prefer the opposite approach: choose the shortest possible registration window (1 year), and have a very clearly defined, properly-documented renewal process that multiple people at the company understand. It's unlikely that all of those people leave the company in a 1-…

We had this same argument about certificate expiration on a code signing project I worked on. I maintained that having to remember to renew a cert every September was more likely to stick with someone than 18 months or two years. It also keeps your blacklist smaller because dead ones age off faster. I don’t recall how it ended up but we added automated reminders every 30 days starting three months before expiry.

[deleted]

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#129
post #92

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 impor…

> A good defense is to limit the renewals for important domains by registering them for as long as possible (10 years) This is an interesting take. I prefer the opposite approach: choose the shortest possible registration window (1 year), and have a very clearly defined, properly-documented renewal process that multiple people at the company understand. It's unlikely that all of those people leave the company in a 1-…

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.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Happy name customer with .io domains that roll over properly. I've used most of the big guys as well (including The Network Solutions).

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
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