Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused, how is it over-engineered?
This is the job of the registrar
It's their job. But it's your ass if they don't do it.
How a domain registrar can kill your business
211–220 of 283 posts
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#212Yes I've heard of domain.com . In fact, we even used it for one of our products. We tried to purchase wildcard ssl via their control panel - the result was a delay from our go live schedule by as much as more than a week. It was the most horrible control panel I've ever used honestly. Feels like bug from the alpha release candidate V1 bugs list. there's this weird bug when it suddenly delete all our mailboxes for no reason. The moment we saw that bug we immediately stop using it.
The support? The first guy that tends to you will always be the most stupidest one. You almost always had to insist to get/ be forwarded to a senior level support with actual brain.
tl;dr Stay 100 miles away from domain.com . By the way it wasn't me that chose domain.com . I would never buy from any website that looks like this.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#213Earlier 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-…
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.
Ceremonies that aren't critical have a higher likelihood of being skipped, forgotten or ignored...
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#214Never heard of domain.com. If anyone wants a recommendation I use namecheap and have never had a problem. They are supporters of the EFF and Net Neutrality. Edit: If you are going to downvote, state why. Namecheap is a good service for a good price and supports Internet freedom. When even GoDaddy was supporting SOPA Namecheap took a stand against SOPA.
"Never had a problem" is not very convincing. I'm sure the vast majority of domain.com customers never had a problem either.
I use domain.com and had TONS of problem. I've never had any problem when buying from anything that is not domain.com (even if i had any, it wasn't as fucked up as domain.com's issues)
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#215I 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…
This is why -generally- there is a period after the domain expires in which it is locked and cannot be purchased by anyone other than the previous owner. Just in case someone tries to squat. There are a few registrars that do this. I've seen it (squatting) happen more to small businesses, because even if their site it showing the landing page they might not notice it until a month later and by then it has been released and squatted. Bigger companies with lots of traffic would usually get a notice from a customer or internal employee that the site is down. This is my experience at least.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I do this for SSL (<= 30), but I should probably do it with the domain as well.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#217Pardon 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 t…
I understand it wasn't a technical problem.
I was wondering if it was possible to have a backup listing of your nameservers in some fashion?
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#218Earlier 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.
I have to disagree. A phishing scam from "billing.foo.com" would be much harder to spot than one from "user-content.foo.com/billing". Especially if the user has free reign over the style + content.
If the user is going to be able to design + style the pages any way they want, having something in the URL to indicate it's still user content is important.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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@company…
It's also important that these notifications are sent to an address that is permanently assigned to a role, e.g. noc@company.com, rather than to any particular person, e.g. steve@company.com. Steve might not be there the next time those domains come up for renewal.
The same rule applies to any email address that you use to purchase and renew domains and other critical services. If renewal emails are being sent to someone who doesn't work there anymore, something is very wrong.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#220That'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 wel…
Not particularly surprising, as the BIOT's only residents are the US and UK military, since the UK deported the 1500 Chagossians in the 70s.