Rescuetime.com domain expired
rescuetime.com
rescuetime.com
We had the domain set to autorenew every 2 years. The card # was no longer valid (one of the frequent instances where banks randomly send out new credit cards and invalidate old ones to keep ahead of fraudsters?).
The amazing thing is that GoDaddy sent the notice that the billing failed at midnight last night. And parked the domain. No grace period.
All of the domains that I DON'T have set to autorenew, GoDaddy bombards me with notices. This? No note to indicate that it's about to be renewed after 2 years. No courtesy note saying, "hey, even though you have 15 domain names that you've paid for successfully, this one isn't auto-renewing successfully-- maybe use another card?".
They just parked the domain.
Given this, I think it is MUCH safer to NOT auto-renew.
Anyhoo, I just renewed it. Apologies to folks who were inconvenienced-- no data will be lost.
This happened to me once, too. For what it's worth:
a) make sure GoDaddy has a monitored email address on file
b) sweep all domains you own once a year, as a repeatable process, on a particular day.
c) If you operate a going concern, go right now and bump your main domain name(s) to 10 years. This costs less than an hour of downtime will.
(1) … the date that a domain with which a document is registered may be used as an indication of the inception date of the document.
(2) Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. … Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith."
Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/domain-age-how-important-...
Matt doesn't say it's not part of the algorithm but he gives the idea it's not that important.
- CSC to hold your domain (https://www.cscglobal.com)
- UltraDNS for your nameservers
- Akamai for your static content
Once it was because the registrar email went into the spam box, the other time because the person that was indicated as the contact had left the company.
I think it's worth putting an alarm into your google calendar, with one occurrence each year, 15 days before, with a SMS + email notification, just in case!