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How a domain registrar can kill your business

uptimechecker.io

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Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#161

Post by MoBattah »

2RTZZSro wrote: post #130
jethro_tell wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Paid via credit card? You can even reverse bank transactions. I do it plenty. Too many organizations are irresponsible.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#162

Post by mmt »

flurdy wrote: post #145

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. regi…

> 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).

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#163

Post by giobox »

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/

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.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#164

Post by DenisM »

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...?

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#165

Post by Scoundreller »

annamargot wrote: post #54
zzzcpan wrote: 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…

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

I'm thinking international presence.

Airbnb has .com, .de, .co.uk, etc.

If they have some disaster with one, they just lose 1 country instead of the planet.

If there's a problem with .de, some users will be intelligent enough to try .com

And if you lose a ccTLD in a major country, you can focus your legal efforts in one legal jurisdiction.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#166

Post by busterarm »

giobox wrote: post #163

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 name…

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.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#167

Post by sammy241 »

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Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#168

Post by yrro »

matte_black wrote: post #156
jacquesm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good luck proving I have any connection to the company in the foreign country sending you the invoice. Also, if payment isn’t received within 30 days you can expect to see the domain forwarded to a “for sale” page. And given how fast the legal system moves especially across international borders, you will lose hundreds of millions in revenue before getting any kind of verdict, possibly even go bankrupt.

Wow, breach of contract, theft and extortion all in one convenient package!

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#169

Post by giobox »

djrogers wrote: post #5

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…

> 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

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).

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#170

Post by MiddleEndian »

pasbesoin wrote: post #157
MiddleEndian wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite issue with namecheap. I have my domains on auto-renew, and every time they're about to be due for their renewal, namecheap sends me a scary email saying I don't have the funds to renew, and only the next day do they auto-renew my domain.

I had that happen with them, when I first finally decided to trust their system to save my credit card information and turned on autorenew. Support told me it was/is because I have a couple of dollar balance with them from years and years ago, back when something involved making a transfer payment to my balance with them and then executing against that balance. If you have autorenew set, it first tries to draw agains…

OK, I'll investigate that solution when I get a chance. I reported it to tech support a year or two ago and they were fairly confused.
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