Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How a domain registrar can kill your business

uptimechecker.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 283 posts

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#171

Post by ryanwaggoner »

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.

Yeah, corporate attorneys and the legal system at large have never dealt with extortionists with your creativity before. I mean, doing it anonymously AND with a ticking time bomb element, only a true master villain could have thought of such a brilliant scheme!

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#172

Post by eridius »

RX14 wrote: post #112
mkirklions wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, anyone want to confirm or add other DNS registrars to the "One of the good ones" list? Ive been recommending my friends to do the entire thing through Dreamhost including a WP install. I personally am more technical, and have my domain name from 7 years ago on godaddy. Any suggestions on where I should use? How about my incompetent friends?

I've always heard good things about gandi

I second this. I've been using gandi.net for a few years now and have had nothing but good experiences with them.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#173

Post by Gustomaximus »

sebst wrote: post #101
hk__2 wrote: post #56

Something that scares me regarding domain names is their variable cost. I purchased a .sexy domain for a joke website and its price got raised by +70% less than one year after that, making the joke a lot less appealing. There’s no guarantee that when you purchase a domain name it reasonably stays around that price for years. Build a business on a domain -> the name increase by XX% -> you’re screwed and must pay.

If it's a joke, okay, 70% might hurt. .sexy is about 60-100$ per year. If you've build a business on it, paying double the amount should not hurt. For me the most important thing about this new gTLDs is more about reputation of the gTLD registry. What if these go out of service? I'm pretty sure that there exist a protocol for that case, but I'm also sure that domains in a less popular new gTLD space might get far les…

> sexy is about 60-100$ per year. If you've build a business on it, paying double the amount should not hurt

I feel the issue is the lack of transparency and control. Who is to say some registrar won't start charging people per visit or % revenue in the future?

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#174

Post by bhartzer »

davidgh wrote: 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…

>> registering them for as long as possible To clarify, you can register them for 100 years, not 10 years. Network Solutions offers the 100 year renewal.

While 100 years or even 10 isn't for everyone, I do still agree: register them for as long as feasible.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#175

Post by walrus01 »

user5994461 wrote: post #129
cialowicz wrote: post #96

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-…

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.

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

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.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#176

Post by scrollaway »

jethro_tell wrote: post #105
crooked-v wrote: post #95

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.

How does one set that up? Im using gandi and didn't know this was possible.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#177

Post by sillysaurus3 »

postit wrote: post #11
trevordixon wrote: post #9

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?

I'm printing and framing this for the next time our PO brings this amazing sub-domain per user idea back on our backlog.

How does zeit.co do it with `now`?

https://zeit.co/now

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#178

Post by scrollaway »

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.

Could you do an AMA once you get out of jail? I'd love to see how this all turns out for you. You seem to be the kind of person who just makes fantastic life decisions.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#179

Post by quickthrower2 »

matte_black wrote: post #109
davidgh wrote: 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.

Yep, great ransom plan!

1. They do not need to pay you. You have zero chance of getting paid.

2. They can easily identify you as a suspect (even with foreign company or whatever) and the police can investigate further.

So you risk going to jail, with no upside.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#180

Post by eli »

gpm wrote: post #155
mkopinsky wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you make domain renewals be monthly or quarterly?

If you have multiple domains you could renew them at seperate times. Has the advantage that a failure might not be so disastrous either.

Only if you had the foresight to register them at different times, right?
Post reply on HN