Comment by hbosch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbosch | Hacker News Reader

The timing of this is an amazing coincidence — I recently “lost” my domain in the same way. I bought it originally on Namecheap but have since transferred all my domains into a singular Google Domains account. My main domain, where I have my personal site and all my important emails, disappeared without notice on Wednesday the 9th last week. No expiration notice sent, no information as to what had happened.

I contacted Google as soon as I noticed and hey have been alright to deal with. Fortunately I am a Gsuite customer. I had to pay a fee to renew and another fee to restore, which was over $100. It’s been in “restoration” mode, ie offline, for days now and I am unable to even touch the DNS records until it’s back. I’ve already lost a week of uptime with zero recourse. FWIW I use a .co domain, and my site was throwing (for 24hrs or so) a splash page saying the domain was suspended.

Eagerly awaiting for it to come back but I’m totally in the dark as to timing.

Did the domain expire, or was there some other issue?

I just transferred some .com domains to Google from Name.com, I hope these expiry problems are limited to non- .com TLDs...

I've always received multiple emails from them leading up to a domain expiration. Not easy to miss, unless your whois email contact isn't current.

(Google Domains gives you free whois privacy, but they use that contact for notifications)

I get so many emails from Google leading up to and after expiration it's a nuisance. As for parent's issue, I think if you let your domain expire that's 100% on you.

Yeah it's hard to feel bad when they start warning you 90 days in advance

The domain did expire, though I was never made aware of the upcoming expiration. My assumption is that there was some glitch between Namecheap, Google, and the .co domain authority... but I still don’t know exactly how my domain expired so silently. All my other domains were purchased through Google, this one was transferred in.

It really was a massive headache. I have no idea how long it would have taken me to notice (site is my authoritative presence on the web, but is a static personal page — no marketing or sales) and my email is a light trickle of messages by design: bills, bank statements, close personal relationships. Fortunately my brother told me his wedding invite bounced a day after going offline so I could follow up relatively quickly.

I filed a ticket with Google and got first line support within an hour. They confirmed it was still in Googles system. Then I was assigned a Senior Specialist who called me on Monday to confirm ownership. It is now Wednesday and my DNS records are still inaccessible.

If I were you I would definitely set an independent annual reminder to check your domain status, just in case.

I note my domains expiration dates and renew them at least 30 days before.

Your not the only person whose had issues recently with Namecheap not sending renewal emails.

Yeah, NameCheap is pretty flaky with the warning emails. I once had their WhoisGuard service expire (it was on a different renewal phase from the actual domain, for some reason), and I never received any warnings about the service expiring until they sent an email to notify me that the WHOIS records had been automatically updated.

I've since added a monthly calendar reminder to log in to all registrars and verify all services are still enabled and correctly configured with plenty of time left.

I have the opposite issue with namecheap. I have my domains on auto-renew, and every time they're about to be due for their renewal, namecheap sends me a scary email saying I don't have the funds to renew, and only the next day do they auto-renew my domain.

I had that happen with them, when I first finally decided to trust their system to save my credit card information and turned on autorenew. Support told me it was/is because I have a couple of dollar balance with them from years and years ago, back when something involved making a transfer payment to my balance with them and then executing against that balance.

If you have autorenew set, it first tries to draw against any existing positive balance you have directly with Namecheap. If/when that doesn't work, it then next tries your preferred payment method (e.g. your registered and designated preferred credit card).

I was told if I found a way to clear my couple of buck balance with Namecheap, I'd no longer get the warning email. The first attempt would be against my credit card, which would work, and I'd just get one success email (after preceding "upcoming" emails and all that).

I don't know whether this is correct. It's what I was told by support over chat, IIRC.

OK, I'll investigate that solution when I get a chance. I reported it to tech support a year or two ago and they were fairly confused.

If you proactively renew instead of waiting for the automatic renewal you can also typically use a coupon to save a little bit of $.

Namecheap not sending renewal emails? I usually get 5-6 notifications when a domain is about to expire, starting 2 months out.

Here it is where the missing notifications that you all are complaining about are gone!

One of the reasons I use Namecheap is because I've had good experiences in this realm. I get domain renewal and WhoisGuard notices a month before, a week before and on the day of expiry itself. Namecheap then always keeps expired domains in a grace period status for about two weeks where I can still renew after expiration.

About a day before they're completely unavailable for renewal, I'll also get an email from CloudFlare saying the nameservers aren't pointing to CF anymore (I use CF for active and parked domains.)

>Namecheap then always keeps expired domains in a grace period status for about two weeks where I can still renew after expiration.

That is standard behaviour for a domain-registrar, when a domain expires. When a domain expires the previous owner can re-register it during the grace period, after that for an extra fee it can be renewed in the redemption-period.

Finally just before a domain is available for re-registration by an unrelated party it will land in the pending-delete state.

Just add onto this, the grace period is normally 10-20 days some registrar's leave the domain working during this time but some take it down. Then it goes into a "redemption period" for anywhere between 25 - 60 days. In the redemption period the registry tacks on a fee that is somewhere between $60 - $200 so the extra fee gets kicked up the chain.

Registrar: Who you registered the domain with

Registry: The company that owns the tld

Wasn't Op complaining about Google DNS, not Namecheap? I've never had any notification issues with Namecheap after almost a decade of them managing most of my domains. If anything they over-communicate about expirations and auto-renewals. Auto-renew works well and even after an expiration it's usually easy and fast to get your domain back up.

I've used name.com for years and thankfully haven't had any of these issues.

Still domains are so cheap and these horror stories are so common that I realize this can happen with any registrar. There isn't enough publicity over issues like this for people to leave en-mass, so financially I can see this happening. I know one small registrar company and it's like 10 people and they write everything in Perl and run everything in Docker.

Fun thing about name.com. I suggested it to my girlfriend and it turns out they don't require e-mail validation. She mis-typed her e-mail address when she registered, and now she can't get into her account. Forgot password doesn't work because it tries to e-mail an address that doesn't exist. She tried to contact them several times but I don't think the support staff understood the situation.

Can I ask why you chose to leave namecheap for Google?

I use Google services for all my domain-connected stuff via Gsuite; that includes Hangouts, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Contacts. On a whim I decided to transfer in the domain. I also use Google Domains, now, to register domains for no specific reason.

There are no features or perks that I know of that compelled me to choose one registrar over the other. It was just a random act.

Idea: Write a Google Script that periodically checks the domain for expiry, then inserts an email directly in your inbox if there is an issue.

This solution is a bit over-engineered, don't you think?

I'm confused, how is it over-engineered?

This is the job of the registrar

I wasn't trying to justify otherwise?

If you have to engineer a solution due to problems caused by the failures of those you depended on to deliver the expected level of service then the entire solution is over-engineered.

Over-engineering is when you make something to be more robust than is necessary for it to work successfully. Evidently depending on the registrar actually failed here (just as it has for many in the past), and this will surely happen again in the future. I don't see how making your system robust to failures that actually come up is over-engineering. It sounds more like just plain old engineering. (And I honestly also fail to see what is productive about pressing on with this conversation.)

Turns out, sometimes someone doesn't do their job, or someone ends up in the hospital, and sometimes weird things just happen.

There are lots of places where we may want redundancy to redund at us.

It's their job. But it's your ass if they don't do it.

You don’t pay them to do it. It’s not their job. In fact by default it is nobodies job, it’s just your own responsibility.

The registrar may see it as an opportunity to sell you another year of service but it is not their job.

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. =)

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