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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

First, you can't renew for more than 10 years.

Second, long-term renewals are precisely the scariest ones. It's actually tremendously difficult for a business to keep a process in place that happens once every 10 years. The employee who registered the domain (and their e-mail address) are probably long gone. The responsibility has been passed along 5 different employees during that time, and the last one got fired and nobody knew they were the one in charge of renewals. And then you find out, suddenly you don't own the domain anymore!

This is the whole problem in a nutshell. Counter-intuitively, if it were a bill sent monthly, it would be much harder for people to forget about (and you could rely on USPS forwarding for changes of address).

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If you believe that Network Solutions will be around and in the domain business long term, you can have them handle it for you.

They offer 20 and 100 year "registration". I put registration in quotes because the max underlying registration is still only 10 years. They implement 20 and 100 year registration by registering for 10 years and then extending that one year per year.

The 100 year "registration" used to even be a good deal. It was $999, which for .com and .net and .org brought the effective per year price down to around what the cheaper registrars charged and locked it in.

I actually thought of using it for my domain, until I remembered that I'll be long dead before getting anywhere near even half of that time out of it. Even taking into account likely price increases in year by year registration at the cheap places, which make the break even point for $999/100 years much earlier than 100 years, I was unlikely to be around that long.

100 years is now $2000, making it a much less interesting deal. Still, assuming a modest annual increase at the cheap registrars it still does eventually win so if you are going to need the domain a long time it might actually be worth it (if you are confident NS will last that long), and does make it so you don't have to think about the problem for another 100 years.

The 20 year option, also for $20/year, is almost certainly not worth it unless not having to worry about renewal for 20 years is an overwhelming concern for you. The prices at the cheaper registrars are probably unlikely to rise fast enough to make the break even for $20/year less that 20 years out, assuming you start with a 10 year registration now so that the current ~$10/year is locked in for 10 years.

>Still, assuming a modest annual increase at the cheap registrars it still does eventually win

I know it's not the main point of your comment, but if you're going to consider future annual increases you should also consider the net present value. If you have to pay $2000 up front and the cost of a domain stays at about ~$10/year but goes up with inflation, you'll never win. Financially, you're better off investing your $2,000 (even very conservatively) and then paying the $10/year registration fee out of your earnings while pocketing the rest (and still having your $2,000 in principal at the end).

> The 100 year "registration" used to even be a good deal.

Yeah, but then you're dealing with Network Solutions for 100 years. That's not a good deal at any price. :P

You can set it up so you renew up to 10 full years (from the remaining 9) every year. That way you have 9 chances to fail before it becomes an issue.

Also for a fairly small organization you can have all the domains listed in one place with the renewal dates and review that every 6 months or year (to make sure all the new ones were added, the contacts are still all valid [hopefully you setup things like [domains]@[companyname].com or something but..., you have noted any that you no longer want or were transferred away...

I use namecheap and just use their auto renew feature. Do other registrars not have that option?

Auto renewal doesn't help here.

Credit cards expire, e-mails get deactivated, addresses change.

If you're not getting notices about your domain expiring in the first place, auto-renew isn't going to stay working after your credit card expires, which is only a couple years.

I use Namecheap, and I have deliberately avoided their auto-renewal service because it doesn't offer me anything.

The key point is that a human needs to be involved in an audit process which occurs regularly. And so I renew all my domains once per year in December, a year in advance.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I could extend one year at a time, but keep a 1-2 year buffer (or larger) in case of dire emergency instead of a 0-1 year buffer.

> I use namecheap and just use their auto renew feature. Do other registrars not have that option?

That still runs into the 10 year problem. Whatever payment information an organization sets up will probably be invalid in 10 years.

> You can set it up so you renew up to 10 full years (from the remaining 9) every year. That way you have 9 chances to fail before it becomes an issue.

That's also a good idea because it gives you plenty of time to switch domains if you have to.

Consider the recent almost-sale of .org which had a lot of people worried about large price increases. If you want to move to a cheaper TLD after such a thing it could take a lot longer than a year. Remember, it's not just web stuff you need to address. There's also email. My primary email has been at my personal domain for over 20 years--getting everyone who has it updated with a new address at a different TLD would not be quick.

By keeping it 10 years out, I've got at least 9 years to deal with moving everything if I have to switch.

This is good solution.

There’s really absolutely no problem with that.

The expiration date is public information, so even if the person left and you have no idea which email is registered on it - you still own the business (and thus can reclaim the account) and can check publically whether the renewal is due.

That's exactly why I renew all my domains on a yearly bases, even for personal ones. It forces me to remember to do it in a way that I never risk forgetting about it.

Just try to remember what you bought 10 years ago, and you'll understand why I'm scared of long-term renewals.

> Second, long-term renewals are precisely the scariest ones. It's actually tremendously difficult for a business to keep a process in place that happens once every 10 years.

Renew for 10 years and then have a process to extend the renewal every year.

If you want a monthly reminder that something exists, you can set that up. Why use the billing service of another company for that reminder function?

A monthly reminder for a person is great. A monthly reminder within a business organization is what? A calendar event for everyone in IT? For the whole company? The nice thing about monthly billing is it comes from the outside and would get bounced around until it found the right desk.

There are plenty of outside reminder services that send reminder emails. Are you saying that the company has a physical address it will always answer but not an email address? Or that it will ignore regular emails to this address unless they contain a bill? (If bills do get reliably paid, why not just make them every 10 years?)

Honestly, what is with that? Why is there a limit on how long I can renew for? Some TLDs I've seen 1 or 2 year limits. What the fuck.

"It's actually tremendously difficult for a business to keep a process in place that happens once every 10 years" "if it were a bill sent monthly"

there are so many calendar and reminder apps out there. just setup two of them to go off to remind you. respectfully, your forgetfulness is not an excuse.

If it was as simple as that companies such as Mark Monitor surely wouldn't exist

it is that simple, however people don't want the responsibility.

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