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How a domain registrar can kill your business

uptimechecker.io

131–140 of 283 posts

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#131

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?

Google to see who handles github.io, one figures all sorts of bad crap must be going on in their subdomains, even if they do try to police it.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#132

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…

>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.

Nice pattern identification. I live in New Zealand and we are Australia's Canada.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#134
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…

John Lewis (the big retailer, not the politician, and not http://twitter.com/johnlewis) forgot to renew the domain of one of their services just this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44108830

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the job of the registrar

I wasn't trying to justify otherwise?

If you have to engineer a solution due to problems caused by the failures of those you depended on to deliver the expected level of service then the entire solution is over-engineered.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#136

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…

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.

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)

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#137
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

Even if you pre-plan, how many of your customers will think some random e-mail from a totally different domain explaining the situation are not a Phishing attempt? (The percentage that don't .. are probably the percentage with the least security sense).

Perhaps, though, in this situation, the had 2/3 days to make people aware.

Also, if the call customer service and you validate it, then they are only offline for a couple hours not days. Also, you should have a status page or twitter or something out of band that you tell people about the day they sign up. You can update there.

EVERY production service with customers needs an out of band way to update. And you have to build and announce that before you need it.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#138
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.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Thanks, I learned the hard way. =)

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't trying to justify otherwise?

If you have to engineer a solution due to problems caused by the failures of those you depended on to deliver the expected level of service then the entire solution is over-engineered.

Over-engineering is when you make something to be more robust than is necessary for it to work successfully. Evidently depending on the registrar actually failed here (just as it has for many in the past), and this will surely happen again in the future. I don't see how making your system robust to failures that actually come up is over-engineering. It sounds more like just plain old engineering. (And I honestly also fail to see what is productive about pressing on with this conversation.)
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