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Comment by AkshitGarg | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious, how does a company manage their domains after they shut down their services to prevent this kind of stuff

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You could pre-pay for X years, where X is long enough to ensure you'll be dead when it expires.

Edit: Seems like there's a 10 year limit in many places? I wonder if that's broad convention or an actual rule.

Okay, apparently an ICANN limit for .com domains:

"The expiration date of the domain registration is extended by the number of years, up to a maximum of ten years, as specified by the Registrar's requested Extend operation."

https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements/com/com-registr...

Though, I can see that navy.us has an expiry in 2053, so it's likely per registry.

Network Solutions will sell you service for 100 years.

Edit: CSC, Markmonitor and similar shops will contract to keep your name available for long periods, too, but that's a bit different.

Or for the life of their company, whichever is shorter.

That's why I said 'sell' instead of 'provide'.

For me I feel like a 10 year pre-pay would be worse. I'll forget about the fact that I need to pay for it again in 2031.

Yearly at least keeps me on my toes a bit.

You still have to renew it yearly to keep the expiration 10 years away.

Also most registrars will send you an email when it's about to expire. If it does get dropped, there's a grave period to recover it.

I can at most pay for 10 years in advance. Is this a limit of my registrar?

On mine, I can pay for up to 10 years, but I think I can just pay twice and get 20.

Edit: It seems to vary. Some places cite an ICANN limit of 10 years.

10 years is the ICANN limit but Network Solutions offers 100 years. According to the fine print what they do is actually register it for 10 years and then every year for the next 90 years they register it for an additional year.

They are betting that they will earn more than enough from investing your up front 100 year payment to more than cover future increases in the cost of those one year extensions.

Their customers are betting that Network Solutions or some successor will be around long enough and that domain names will work like the do now long enough that this will be worth it.

Most registries limit domain lifetimes to 10 years. You can't renew a domain if doing so would put the lifetime beyond 10 years -- the registry will refuse to perform the operation.

Clearly there are companies that offer extension as a service, you pay 20 times as much and they promise to extend your domain 10 times.

That just moves the problem though, how likely is it that that company will be around in 90 years to perform the last extension?

That may vary by registrar. My .com domain is about 2 years out from renewal and the most it will let me add is 8.

Likely the registry, not registrar. When I worked at one 10 was the limit. Unsure if that was handed down by ICANN, though.

Aren't most domains limited to 10 years max?

I would think the same way a person would posthumously: let it expire and let natural order take over or delegate ownership via legal/custodial means.

Sorry that doesn’t answer your question more than “it depends on the entity”.

They don’t. They have shut down. Why would they care what happens?

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