Should we trust .ly/local domains for our startups? | Hacker News Reader

Should we trust .ly/local domains for our startups?

11 pointsbrackin7 comments

I just received an email from Letter.ly, the premium newsletter service founded by Sam Lessen. I'll paste the contents but essentially they can't renew their .ly domain.

It's really got me thinking about how registering a local domain such as this is risky, especially with companies like bit.ly relying on them for all of their business. I own a .io domain but have a .com backup which everyone should probably think about when buying a .ly or similar domain.

"hello letterly authors,

last week, the agency that we used to register the letter.ly domain was taken down as a side effect of the war in libya (.ly is the libyan top level domain). our domain registration expired, and we were unable to renew it. as the expiration propagated, the site appeared to be dead and emails sent to your subscribers probably bounced.

1) sorry for the hassle. it's amazing that a physical war has affected our service in this way.

2) we are now letterly.net. this means that you will send emails to secretcode@letterly.net instead of secretcode@letter.ly, and new subscribers should be directed to letterly.net/yoururl".

There's also a rather longer discussion on the same event at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406681

I think you need to consider what country you're doing business with. Libya was never exactly a 'friend' of the west. Risking your entire business to have some strange extension (I don't see the appeal personally, but to each their own) seems somewhat foolish. There are gTLDs (com) which avoid all these issues along with stable countries that are far more trusted if you really want a ccTLD (de, ca, etc)

FYI: Ben Metcalfe warned about problems with .ly domains back in October 2010. (see http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-to-b...)

As discussed at the time Ben was hosting adult links which were specifically forbidden by the registrar policy. It's no different to the US seizing domains used for illegal activities.

War breaking out certainly wasn't on people's agenda as a reason for not buying a domain (although maybe it should have been).

I will not comment on wether one should rely on .ly domains, but I wanted to point out it is STILL POSSIBLE to order and update the nameservers of .LY domains.

I did so by emailing lydomains@libyanspider.com

I think that the takeaway from that post, for me, was that IF you absolutely can't have another registrar, it's probably worthwhile to purchase your domain in long, multi-year chunks, and be prepared to have thrown that money away if they ever take it out from under you.

Obviously, this doesn't speak to whether or not it's 'safe', but Letterly has illustrated that, at least presently, the 'point of failure' is at the registrar. Other (not-expired) .ly domains seem to be resolving just fine, which is the point of DNS of course, and it's safe to say that if they hadn't already been up for renewal, they'd likely be safe until they were.

As it stands, I don't even know if there are any registrars selling .ly domains, or if it's simply their registrar that's having issues.

Thanks for the reply, Agreed, I suppose it makes a lot more sense to buy a domain like this in such a way. I'm not sure if they are selling them at the moment but it's interesting.

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