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Comment by shaicoleman | Hacker News Reader

Always register your domain with a different provider. A domain is one of the crown jewels of a company.

If you lose the domain, you lose everything (email, web, services, etc.), possibly permanently, with no option to migrate without losing your domain, branding, SEO position, etc.

e.g.

* Your server got hacked, and your entire account gets blocked

* You get a shock bill from AWS, and lose access to the account because the account is unpaid.

* Also it allows your hosting provider to hold you ransom to payment or you lose everything

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The consequences are not quite so dramatically irrevocable. I’ve recently assisted a family member whose hosting provider was bought by a gang of unscrupulous clowns and their domains effectively held to ransom. It took only hours to recover them and switch registrars, during which time I’d used/activated only the same channels and processes available to any other registrant. And AWS are not a gang of pirates.

Someone less directly versed in the intricacies of registries and registrars and service providers might take longer to assert rights, deploy governance machinery, and achieve the same result, but the existential finality described above would be better painted as a time-consuming and Byzantine inconvenience.

I read domain registration horror stories with a pinch of salt. Not just because the sector is (like cryptocurrencies) riddled with scammers and shysters and liars and con-artists, but also because even the most Kafkesque fuckups I’ve seen ultimately started with incompetence, inexperience, arrogance, or negligence (usually omitted in the telling) on the part of the apparent victim.

Can you share a resource to learn more about the recovery process?

Well there’s a lot to learn, but you can do worse than start with the ICANN dispute processes. And they are many: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help-2012-02-03-en

Country code registries have their own, and many apparent registrars are actually reselling Tucows or OpenSRS, both of whom have compliance teams that create significant leverage over resellers.

However, communicating them with them concisely and unambiguously requires care and understanding. Obtaining a result from the people who execute these processes means encoding requests in terms of their incentives rather than your own. Many people find that hard to do, especially people burdened by their own overwhelming sense of entitlement. This is of course advice for anyone engaging with an external bureaucracy, and the best way to internalise it, is to have run one.

Also worth using a premium domain service like CSC -- if there is an issue you have a 24/7 contact and for overseas domains they usually have local agents who can hold the domain if rules change that would ordinarily disqualify you from holding that ccTLD

Yes I agree, you can always do that and set Route53 as your dns for some specific AWS functionality. For instance static site hosting on a S3 bucket on your main domain (not www) isn't possible without having your domain in route53. Bigger threat of losing domains is not paying for them.

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