I don't know if this is a culture thing or personal style, but the author keeps emphasizing that the story is true. To me, that reduces credibility since I've often heard false stories whose narrators reiterated their truthfulness unexpectedly when I wasn't doubting them. Not very reliable logic, I know, but it's a small warning bell.
How a domain registrar can kill your business
191–200 of 283 posts
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#192Mistakes and glitches happen. Op should have noticed their domain did not renew a month before it expired, not just before.
DNS and domain propagation are slow turning ships. If a problem occurs, you sometimes need days to straighten out the problems.
> I tried to set nameservers to correct values, but Control panel returned error: uptimechekcer.io is not managed here!
They misspelled their own domain in this article. It seems their problem is a lack of attention to detail.
The complaint about charging for domain registration is nonsense. Domain registrations are non-refundable. If a registrar ever registered domains for customers before payment, they’d quickly find themselves out of business. Payment is always up front across the industry.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#193I 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-…
> choose the shortest possible registration window (1 year)
Registering domains for only a year at a time will negatively impact your email reputation.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#194The timing of this is an amazing coincidence — I recently “lost” my domain in the same way. I bought it originally on Namecheap but have since transferred all my domains into a singular Google Domains account. My main domain, where I have my personal site and all my important emails, disappeared without notice on Wednesday the 9th last week. No expiration notice sent, no information as to what had happened. I contact…
Can I ask why you chose to leave namecheap for Google?
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I know everyone thinks police are going to investigate and that I’m definitely going to prison, but the sad reality is they probably won’t and I’d probably never see a jail cell. They might look into it, maybe even setup a sting operation, but then in the end nothing might come of it anyway.
Trust me, I know of a ex-cofounder in a previous who company who took off and disappeared with $175k from the company bank account, and despite our best efforts at getting justice or the money back, no one really gave a fuck, and there wasn’t much we could do unless we wanted to get into very expensive legal battles using money we didn’t have, against a person that was hard to get a hold of and with no guarantee of getting our money back, at least anytime soon (years). It was much more practical to just cut the losses and move on, making sure we could do everything to prevent it from happening again by someone else.
And the truth is this is how it is for a lot of things, the successful cases you hear of are really just a small percent of the crimes. Just don’t pick a fight with someone who has the money and determination to hunt you down to the bitter end. Most people eventually give up. Unless you’re killing people or running drugs, there’s a lot of criminal arbitrage you can get away with due to how slow and how apathetic the law is.
Though I sometimes do think about the price I would have to pay if there was a reckoning.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#196My 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?
It’s your domain. They are under no obligation to report to you something you are doing. Phishers would use these emails to test whether or not they’re avoiding detection.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm printing and framing this for the next time our PO brings this amazing sub-domain per user idea back on our backlog.
The problem was the phishing, not the subdomain. If your app allows users to run phishing operations, moving the content from user.foo.com to www.foo.com/user probably won't help much in parent's scenario.
No. The problem is the subdomain. Allowing people to phish on a subdomain is lending the phisher the credibility of legitimate websites hosted on the domain. It’s like lending a thief your uniform so that he can disguise himself as an employee. You’re an accomplice when he uses it to steal.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#198Pardon my ignorance, but this is something I've always wondered. You can setup fail over DNS servers, just list different DNS servers, possibly from different companies, with your registrar. Is the registrar a unavoidable single-point of failure? Your multiple name servers are listed with your one-and-only-one registrar, no matter what?
This wasn’t a technical problem with the domain. The DNS changed because op’s registrar failed to renew the domain. The website was working intermittently because of propagation, not a server issue.
Problems like this are why registrars renew domains a month before they expire. The way to avoid these issues is to check to see if your domain renews on time. If your registrar fails to renew it, you have ample time to transfer it to another registrar.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#199I 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-…
Why not renew for ten years, then every year extend it by one more year. Best of both worlds and if something screws up, you have 9 more years to fix it.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.