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Comment by simonswords82 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why we created a domain name/ssl reminder tool: http://www.expirify.com. A really easy mistake to make and very costly, I hope they get it back

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Shouldn't the registrar do that? Namecheap sends me multiple emails when any of my domains is about to expire, it's just common business sense.

1&1 and gandi both offer automatic renewal. In fact I don't think I would use a registrar that didn't offer that.

More likely what happened was that the guy who was incharge disappeared and/or his credit card number changed. And when the registrar tried to renew - it couldn't and I'm sure sent tons of emails of "HEY YOU NEED TO FIX THIS". Something similar almost happened to CentOS.

I've been with Gandi for years, absolutely love them

So far it's been rocky with me. I had a VM that I used with what I think is called GandiFlex (I set it to lower the memory during the night and increase during the day) and apparently when my VM tried to scale up the hypervisor didn't have enough memory and for some reason failed to migrate the VM to another hypervisor. This left my VM offline for many hours until I noticed it.

Gandi's customer support official response "don't use it". Gandi's management response "you are right - we don't have enough monitoring and are looking into it". With no follow ups.

At least they credited me, generously, for their latest outage in their US datacenter.

The registrar part of Gandi (their historical business) is very, very good. The hosting part (more recent business) slightly less so.

Namecheap and GoDaddy also offer auto renewal. I've never heard of auto renewal not being offered.

Hover as well.

Some domain registrars send postal notices. However they don't charge discount pricing.

Most of them offer automatic renewals--they love customers that click automatic renewals. Godaddy literally changes your setting to automatic renewal.(This would be a good class action lawsuit--for such a classy company?)

The problem with automatic renewals is its fine if you just have one domain. If you have a lot of domains it makes financial sense to shop around? I've always gone with the cheapest registrar(that I feel will be around in a year, or two), and never had a problem. Personally, I heard a long time ago the true cost of registering a domain is around $7.49. I don't know if that's correct? I don't like to pay much more than that per year--just on principal.

Since, people are throwing around companies, Google domains are $10 bucks a year/with free privacy. (At least they were a few months ago?) Godaddy did away with renewal discount codes; I see no reason to use that company anymore?

This is actually mandatory for gTLDs:

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/errp-2013-02-28-en

The registrar does indeed do that, but only to the owner of the account. What if say you work in an agency and the person who setup the account has left? We created Expirify because we missed an SSL certificate renewal notice because it was sent to somebody who no longer worked with us...

Just a heads up, your DNS took a long time to resolve for me. You appear to have an invalid nameserver (ns3.gridhost.co.uk) listed at the root.

https://r1dns.com/dnscheck.cgi?domain=expirify.com

Thanks r1ch! I'll get that sorted :)

It looks like the service is free. How do you make money on the site?

You could be somewhat sinister and register domains that have been submitted but not renewed and offer to transfer them back for a fee.

If you only offer it to the original owner and the fee isn't particularly exorbitant, say $10 - $100, it might not even be sinister. Wouldn't you rather pay the slightly inflated renewal than deal with someone who's asking 5 - 6 digits?

The service is currently free, there's a bunch of ways we might monetise it but for now we're happy putting out there to see how people get on with it.

How is this necessary if there is a grace period after a domain expires?

It is still better to act early than having someone else squatting your address for a few days.

You can't use your domain in grace period until you pay. It gets redirected.

With ICANN registrars, that is true.

DENIC, for example, (which operates seperately and has their own, incompatible WHOIS system), operates .de differently:

After your domain ran out, it will get "locked", all DNS settings will be locked they were before, and you get a letter or an SMS. The domain will stay locked for 2 weeks, during that you can enter the code from the SMS or letter on a website to move the domain to another registrar or delete the domain.

If you don’t react at all, after 2 weeks, the domain goes into TRANSIT. It still stays locked, but now you get actually billed for it, until you enter the code or delete the domain.

Essentially, with DENIC, the domain stays locked until you decide to delete it or move it to another registrar.

You can also disable the TRANSIT, in that case, if the domain runs out, after 2 weeks grace period of being locked it actually runs out.

Remember: Not all NICs operate like ICANN.

See above comment from icebraining

> Some people manage dozens, or even hundreds of domains. It's quite common in the "custom website design" world for the company (often a small agency) to manage the hosting of the site and domain.

Easy? Really? I get that you are offering a service, but I can guarantee that if there were something as fundamentally and existentially important as securing my domain name, it would not be an easy thing to forget to do. I can't even begin comprehending how one forgets to do such a thing.

Some people manage dozens, or even hundreds of domains. It's quite common in the "custom website design" world for the company (often a small agency) to manage the hosting of the site and domain.

Yep, that was exactly the use case we built it for. We scratched our itch. When you've got a group of people all managing domain names/SSL certs for various customers it's very easy to lose track of one.

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