Last year, one of my paid domains (.ml) showed up as being free in Freenom dashboard, even though I had 3 months to go. I needed it, and since I know support is unresponsive, I paid for it for another year, because I wanted to avoid any kind of downtime.
Support answered after a few days and they corrected the issue. However I didn't notice that now my renewal date was now set to 3 months earlier than when I first paid for the domain.
Because of this, along with the fact that I didn't get a renewal notification email this year, and along with the fact that Freenom doesn't seem to have a grace period, my domain expired.
I went in my dashboard, paid the invoice, but the domain still isn't mine. I tried to buy it again, but I got an error.
I contacted support but couldn't wait for them, so I used another account to buy it (for free), and it seemed to work.
After a day or two I got this email from support, warning me against buying the domain with a different account, because I run the risk of getting banned.
From time to time, we have to limit free domain registrations and put in place blocks.
These blocks can be imposed for a variety of reasons including (but not limited to):
- the country from which registrations originate;
- the domain names themselves;
- the IP addresses from which registrations originate;
- the device from which registrations originate;
- the use of measures (such as proxies and VPNs) to hide your true location from us;
- a history of bad registrations in the account from which registrations originate.
You are currently blocked from registering any additional free domains.
For reasons of security, we cannot go into the precise reasons for this block. We also cannot make any predictions on when you will be allowed to register new free domains.
Please come back in a few days and try to register a domain again. If our systems still do not allow you to register new domains, you'll need to wait longer.
Please do NOT register additional accounts or use any other accounts that you may already have, as this will lead to these accounts being banned, possibly indefinitely.
Kind regards,
Freenom Support
Fortunately I don't have a website running on that domain, but I do have a secondary email address for non-critical accounts. This is dumb, I know. I got hooked because it was free, and then I thought it's better to pay ~$10 for a renewal, than have to spend a few days changing emails on many of my accounts.
After that email I did just that; I went through most of my accounts and changed emails. I've learned my lesson and I hope to have some foresight in the future.