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

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#261

Post by justherefortart » Thu, May 17, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #116

justherefortart wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used register.com since the 90s. They're so bad I switched 20+ domains to name.com. DO NOT USE web.com or register.com, they're fucking terrible.

Happy name customer with .io domains that roll over properly. I've used most of the big guys as well (including The Network Solutions).

I used Network Solutions when they were the only game in town. Switched to Register in the late 90s. Just stuck with them because I didn't have any issues.

In the last 5-10 years the issues started growing. Finally, I hit a wall and transferred everything off their service.

I now get spam emails of them trying to trick me into switching my domains back. The vitriol their helpdesk people receive is about as shitty as I get. Maybe they don't deserve it in their role, but hopefully the angry emails will get them to find a better job asap.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#262

Post by matte_black » Thu, May 17, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #255

matte_black wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acco…

Just don’t pick a fight with someone who has the money and determination to hunt you down to the bitter end. You're not making any sense. You started this entire thread by talking about how you'd hold this $billion+ company's domain ransom for tens of thousands of dollars per year, so your sad tale of woe about how you couldn't afford an attorney to chase down an embezzler is irrelevant.

I don’t believe I said it had to be this particular company.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#263

Post by rakibtg » Thu, May 17, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

I had similar experience with domain.com

Their support team is from India, and they took a week to solve the issue.

I am looking for good domain service provider to transfer all of my domains 30+

Any recommendations? We use Digitalocean as the hosting service provider

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#264

Post by aheppy » Thu, May 17, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

rakibtg wrote: post #263

I had similar experience with domain.com Their support team is from India, and they took a week to solve the issue. I am looking for good domain service provider to transfer all of my domains 30+ Any recommendations? We use Digitalocean as the hosting service provider

I've used Namecheap for many years and have found them very reliable and their customer service responsive.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#265

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, May 17, 2018, 2:44 PM 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…

Probably late to this party but at my employer we have a contract with MarkMonitor under which domains are auto-renewed and then we are invoiced for the cost.

The advantage of this is that domain renewals are not broken by payment problems. Payment problems produce a failure state of "domain got renewed, the vendor is harassing us about an invoice"--which is much preferred to "domain did NOT get renewed, our site is down until we update our credit card." It also helps mitigate the "crucial employee departed" problem, since MarkMonitor won't just give up on an unpaid invoice... they will escalate if they don't get paid.

Of course as a matter of practice we always have multiple people with access to the dashboard, but if all those people got kidnapped at once, the domains would still renew.

I recognize that MarkMonitor is more expensive than Namecheap or GoDaddy or whoever, but I also bet that a lot of successful companies that are super reliant on their domains have never called for pricing. I don't work for a mega-corp; we're a nonprofit. And who knows, maybe other registrars may be willing to offer a similar payment structure.

(I'm not affiliated with MM in any way--just a happy customer.)

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#266

Post by tialaramex » Thu, May 17, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

dylz wrote: post #79

madengr wrote: post #24

Back in the late 90's before it was Verisign (I can't recall the name), my domain registration could only be changed with an email from my domain. Of course I didn't have my domain up since I switched ISP and had to move my DNS and mail server. Catch 22; what a cluster fuck. Weeks of phone calls with no resolutions. I was going to Virginia anyway, so I physically showed up at Verisign (I wanted to bring a baseball ba…

Can you explain the LCD thing a bit more? I've not seen a physical separate GPS unit before.

Also more generally, once upon a time a GPS (Formally GPS Receiver) was a device the size of say, a multimeter, with a big battery pack, a simple monochrome unlit LCD panel display, and a radio (later, more expensive units had several radios). The device is doing fancy mathematics, and just receiving GPS signals, even the metadata about where to look for GPS satellites in the sky is available, very slowly, over GPS. It has no other source of data.

So you'd buy one or turn it on after uncrating it in a foreign country, and it'd literally spend ten or fifteen minutes calibrating, figuring out what the time is, what satellites are on what frequencies and which are above the horizon before it could at last discern your position. This was amazing if you genuinely didn't know where you were e.g. "Hmm, a desert". But you'd never have used one to go shopping - it took far too long.

Today your phone has a GPS with lots of radios (so it can listen to every satellite at the same time) it always knows the rough time,and it uses the Internet to get public shared data rather than wait to receive it slowly from GPS.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#267

Post by cuckcuckspruce » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:00 PM UTC

yrro wrote: post #168

matte_black wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, breach of contract, theft and extortion all in one convenient package!

Who says technology doesn't have a sociopath problem

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#268

Post by jethro_tell » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

systematical wrote: post #216

jethro_tell wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't hurt. =)

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#269

Post by josefresco » Thu, May 17, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

I create websites for small businesses. I've seen almost every conceivable domain renewal failure in my 20 years of experience. No matter how many times we remind clients to get this aspect of their business documented we still have sites go down every year. We charge a fee to "manage" domains for those who opt-in, solely for this reason (and it's worth it).

The most common reasons:

Bad contact email

Auto renew off

Expired CC

Lost password

The more obscure:

Bought domain through a reseller who is now out of business (more common than you think)

"Branded" contact email which post expiration, no longer works.

Disgruntled "losing" webmaster who registered domain under his/her account and is now holding it hostage.

Re: How a domain registrar can kill your business

#270

Post by joecool1029 » Thu, May 17, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

mjcl wrote: post #141

joecool1029 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Paid gsuite has live 24/7 phone support. I've used 5-6 times over 8 years and gotten 5-star service every single time. I've been a reseller for most of the decade and I can honestly say in all the times we've called, we have never had a single issue corrected by support. We usually end up having to find workarounds for bugs. The last time was an autosuspension our panel(s - there are two versions now) would not let…

Office 365 is pretty close to that, actually. You need Premier support to get anything useful. My favorite O365 support story is where first level support dicked around so long with a missing mailbox that by the time they escalated the ticket, their backup had been overwritten. Luckily it was a user’s archive mailbox and we still had their source PSTs, so not a lot was lost.

> Office 365 is pretty close to that, actually. You need Premier support to get anything useful.

I haven't had too much experience with their service support, but their app support seemed decent. I was having an issue with S/MIME signatures not being parsed properly on Outlook iOS. Support chat seemed competent and knew what was happening (no support for S/MIME signatures yet).