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Comment by bbhacker | Hacker News Reader

Curious to hear how that happened :)

It happens more often than we think (2 times with some customers I know of).

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!

I'm guessing they had it on auto-renew but didn't have a valid credit card registered with godaddy (i.e the card they registered with expired) or something.

Godaddy told me that you get a week of uptime after the first declined auto-renewal charge.

That is absolutely false. Domain expiration date for RescueTime.com was the 14th (yesterday). This AM I did a gmail search for "GoDaddy RescueTime" and the only thing they sent me regarding this was midnight last night when they shut it off. I have dozens of recent automated emails from GoDaddy and also checked my spam folder just to make sure my anger wasn't unfair.

That is exactly it. GoDaddy doesn't give any sort of courtesy heads up. Expiration date was yesterday at midnight. When billing failed (despite the fact that I'm a customer in good standing with a mess of other domains) they IMMEDIATELY parked the domain. I imagine I selected auto-renew because it seemed like I was less likely to screw up renewing the domain. I no longer think that's the safe path.

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