For a very long time, DNS simply has not been an identified risk for most corporations. In the risk analysis they make, DNS is not on the map at all, even though it may be a single point of complete collapse for them. Thus we see extremely large corporations depending on a single DNS provider, using a registrar that are more interested in profit rather than resilience against attacks, no DNSSEC. Etc etc. This is slowly changing. What is. Not changing fast enough is the ability to run more than one DNS provider, giving you yet another spof.
How a domain registrar can kill your business
221–230 of 283 posts
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#222Earlier 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-…
You could do both. Register it out ten years and each your register an additional one.
10 years sounds a bit inflexible for me. Things can get a little weird if you switch registrars but you have more than 9 years left on your domain so you can't get a full additional year.
I do try to maintain a margin of at least 3 years on important personal and business domains, though.
Less than 37 months left = immediate attention required.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#223This is an interesting discussion, as I’ve recently run into problems with transferring a domain from domain.com to google domains.
I’ve heard good things about google domains in the past and the price seemed right (never had a problem with domain.com, but they charge separately for domain privacy) and now I’m stuck in Vonnegut-like situation. They locked my account because apparently the record that was transferred in doesn’t exactly match my uploaded govt ID. I can’t/won’t change my legal name, and the account is locked so I can’t fix the record. The phone support was sympathetic but said I had to go through email, which I’m pretty sure is an AI. This has been going on for a month now, and I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get this resolved.
I haven’t seen any discussion or experiences people have with AWS route 53. Is that a valid option? Seems reasonable and has privacy included.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem with relying on auto-renew is that, sooner or later, your credit card will expire (or the employee who was in charge of the domain will be gone) and the renewal will fail. The account needs maintenance one way or another.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#225Something 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.
Avoid the new gTLDs. Most are mismanaged crap. The gTLD system was the greedist and worst decision ICANN ever made.
Stick with tried and true domains - ideally .com, but your country's ccTLD is another good choice.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#226I worked at a domain registrar for over ten years. Every day I would have to deal with a call from some irate customer who's business was down because they forgot to renew the domain. This was after we would send them emails, starting a month before the renewal was due and then more frequently the closer they got to the renewal date. Many times they wouldn't even notice until the domain had passed the grace period, fully expired and been snatched up by some scalper and replaced with adverts.
Then they would be on the phone claiming to be losing thousands of pounds for every minute the website was offline and how it needed to be resolved right now or they would be sending in their lawyers.
If your business resolves around having a functional website, make sure you have a solid domain renewal plan in place and are hosting with a trustworthy registrar.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#227I worked at a domain registrar for over ten years. Every day I would have to deal with a call from some irate customer who's business was down because they forgot to renew the domain. This was after we would send them emails, starting a month before the renewal was due and then more frequently the closer they got to the renewal date. Many times they wouldn't even notice until the domain had passed the grace period, f…
> This was after we would send them emails
Did your e-mails look like spam by any chance? e.g. contain images, look like newsletters, contain tracking pixels, etc. -- most such e-mails get auto-deleted on my end.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#228The whole domain registration system is a very complex and messy area to work with, both from a development as an enduser perspective. I speak from experience working at a hosting company implementing domain registrations directly with the registry systems.
It's a incomprehensible mishmash of tld's implementing different methods of registering, renewing, restoring, domains. Some require ID verification before registrations, some have a quarantine of 1 week, other of 4 weeks, some no quarantine. Some domains need to be renewed before expiry, some can still be used 2 weeks after expiry, some domains allow transfers and trades, others don't or do under strict circumstances. Some require transfer codes, others don't. Some transfer codes are valid for 1 week, some are valid for longer.
There is no decent standarization on the technical level when it comes to managing domain registrations. There is the EPP protocol but almost none of the registries implement a standardized way of registering domains each implementing a mess of extensions to suit their bureaucratic needs.
ICANN introducing over 1.2k new gTLD's some time ago also didn't help along with the introcution of domains containing non standard latin characters and the puny-code implementation there (eg: café.com is actually listed as xn--caf-dma.com)
I'm not trying to defend domain.com who obviously failed to deliver on the basics of decent support, but things like this (issues between domain vendor and registry) happen more than most of us like to admit.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#229I 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…
Personally I recommend adding domain expiry checks to your monitoring system. Same with SSL certificate expiry.
Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business
#230I work for a domain registrar, albeit not the one mentioned in the article.
Obviously, we see a lot of expired domains on a daily basis, mainly because customer's forget to renew despite us reminding them repeatedly during the three months before the domains expire.
General advice: 1) Make sure there is more than one single contact person for invoicing. All too often, the problem is that a single employee is unavailable for some reason and that the rest of the business have no idea that the domain needs to be renewed.
2) Keep the contact details valid and up-to-date. This should be a no-brainer but a surprisingly large amount of businesses have domains registered to single employees, or with invalid contact emails.
3) Don't wait until the domains expire; renew the domains for at least one additional year. It will give you a whole year to fix stuff if you forget a reminder. EDIT: Or if the registrar screws up like in this case.
4) Automatic renewals is your friend. It's a last line of defense if all else fails.
5) Make sure you have a process for handling all of the above, even if you're a one-man business. Domain names are often critical for the business, and it's ridiculous to let the entire business rely upon a reminder sent 90 days before expiry.