How a domain registrar can kill your business • Hacker News Board

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#201

Post by paulsutter » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:18 AM UTC

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…

More mature companies usually keep a contract calendar where they aggregate important dates for all signed contracts.

Funny thing about domain renewal is that it’s so inexpensive that it can fall through the cracks and not get on the calendar.

Could be useful to think of all the little deadlines that cause risk and use a single process.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#202

Post by jethro_tell » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:31 AM UTC

anothergoogler wrote: post #97

Alupis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always received multiple emails from them leading up to a domain expiration. Not easy to miss, unless your whois email contact isn't current. (Google Domains gives you free whois privacy, but they use that contact for notifications)

I get so many emails from Google leading up to and after expiration it's a nuisance. As for parent's issue, I think if you let your domain expire that's 100% on you.

Yeah it's hard to feel bad when they start warning you 90 days in advance

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#203

Post by stevekemp » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC

oedmarap wrote: post #93

jtl999 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the reasons I use Namecheap is because I've had good experiences in this realm. I get domain renewal and WhoisGuard notices a month before, a week before and on the day of expiry itself. Namecheap then always keeps expired domains in a grace period status for about two weeks where I can still renew after expiration. About a day before they're completely unavailable for renewal, I'll also get an email from Clou…

>Namecheap then always keeps expired domains in a grace period status for about two weeks where I can still renew after expiration.

That is standard behaviour for a domain-registrar, when a domain expires. When a domain expires the previous owner can re-register it during the grace period, after that for an extra fee it can be renewed in the redemption-period.

Finally just before a domain is available for re-registration by an unrelated party it will land in the pending-delete state.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#204

Post by protomyth » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:39 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #190

djsumdog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember last year how Google, GoDaddy and CloudFlair all threw this one website under the bus: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... The Internet isn't as free as people think it is. Things still need to be hosts and those providers could simply chose to stop hosting you.

>The Daily Stormer, a website with highly controversial hate speech, was recently scrubbed from the Internet. >A store cannot have blacks only and whites only bathrooms or water fountains. It's amazing how someone can unironically defend the plight of a website that they admit produces "highly controversial hate speech" by comparing it indirectly to none other than racial segregation.

Today it’s the dregs, tomorrow it’s your nonconformity. Blindness in utilities is a good thing for everyone.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#205

Post by jethro_tell » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:54 AM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #90

hbosch wrote: post #13

The 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…

Idea: Write a Google Script that periodically checks the domain for expiry, then inserts an email directly in your inbox if there is an issue.

We check for domain expiry and then trigger an alarm in the monitoring system when the valid.date.days <= 90

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#206

Post by davewasthere » Thu, May 17, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #176

jethro_tell wrote: post #105

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.

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

Buy 10 years of registration initially, then each year set yourself a reminder to extend this by one year. It's not automagical.

That said, with Gandi, you can just set it to auto-renew, which works pretty well.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#207

Post by nodesocket » Thu, May 17, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

If this service was some run of the mill e-commerce or SaaS I wouldn't have this reaction, but being a critical monitoring service that was down for days, this reflects very poorly on them. My reaction is that I'd never use uptimechecker.io. Quite honestly I am baffled why they'd even want to write this post for others unaware of their company and the outage to discover. It does not reflect well on them, despite spinning it and rightly blaming domain.com.

Just use a respected and well known registrar such as Amazon Route 53 domains. This could have all been avoided. I know the blame "should" fall on domain.com, but ultimately startups are responsible for their service.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#208

Post by adventist » Thu, May 17, 2018, 4:17 AM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #207

If this service was some run of the mill e-commerce or SaaS I wouldn't have this reaction, but being a critical monitoring service that was down for days, this reflects very poorly on them. My reaction is that I'd never use uptimechecker.io. Quite honestly I am baffled why they'd even want to write this post for others unaware of their company and the outage to discover. It does not reflect well on them, despite spin…

Wasn't their fault. Their users deserve to know exactly what happened. I value transparency.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#209

Post by nodesocket » Thu, May 17, 2018, 4:23 AM UTC

adventist wrote: post #208

nodesocket wrote: post #207

If this service was some run of the mill e-commerce or SaaS I wouldn't have this reaction, but being a critical monitoring service that was down for days, this reflects very poorly on them. My reaction is that I'd never use uptimechecker.io. Quite honestly I am baffled why they'd even want to write this post for others unaware of their company and the outage to discover. It does not reflect well on them, despite spin…

Wasn't their fault. Their users deserve to know exactly what happened. I value transparency.

Absolutely, send your current customers an e-mail explaining... Just not convinced a public blog post is good business for them moving forward.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#210

Post by jchw » Thu, May 17, 2018, 4:43 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #204

jchw wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Daily Stormer, a website with highly controversial hate speech, was recently scrubbed from the Internet. >A store cannot have blacks only and whites only bathrooms or water fountains. It's amazing how someone can unironically defend the plight of a website that they admit produces "highly controversial hate speech" by comparing it indirectly to none other than racial segregation.

Today it’s the dregs, tomorrow it’s your nonconformity. Blindness in utilities is a good thing for everyone.

All I'm saying is that their own analogy is alarmingly lacking in self awareness, not commenting on what I believe.

Frankly though, this is blown way out of proportion. Plenty of people will do business with them. The Daily Stormer is just the ultimate martyr. They have mastered the art of doing one thing and saying another. They absolutely incite violence and hate, but they're careful to also simultaneously distance themselves from it and play the victim when they wonder why no big company really wants to do business with them. There's a reason why 4chan never really had this issue despite similarly controversial content and the answer isn't just "politics."

No, in my opinion, the real problem is that The Daily Stormer as an entity, is an Asshole. And just like they would in real life, they're being kicked out. Nobody has really made a compelling case otherwise, everyone seems more concerned that big companies actually made a non-nuetral decision (something I wish they'd do more often in the era of fake news and large scale abuse, an era they facilitated...)

I see no slippery slope here. There's a balance to be had.