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Comment by Samon | Hacker News Reader

For me, owning my own email domain is far more about control than privacy. I currently use some MX and SMTP trickery to forward all of my email to Gmail, effectively using Gmail as my 'email client' - but because the domain is mine, I can change that without too much headache, unlike if I were just using an @gmail.com address.

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You don’t own a domain name you rent it. If you ever forget to renew it or you are unable to renew it for some reason then it becomes available for anyone else to register. At that point the new owner can receive all your email and potentially access any accounts which use that email as 2FA. I’m not saying you should never do this but it’s not a silver bullet.

yep cos of Covid namecheap sold my domain to a squatter who now wants $10k for something i've renewed for years for $12.

That was so shitty coming back round to reality and everything broken. Still upset about it. To this day I have no idea why the card didn't pay as always.

> cos of Covid namecheap sold my domain to a squatter

Can you elaborate? As a Namecheap customer, this is concerning.

I'm not sure if this was added after your comment, but in the second line of their post jamiek88 said

> To this day I have no idea why the card didn't pay as always.

One can infer that the credit card did not auto-pay, the domain expired, and Namecheap immediately resold the domain to a squatter rather than first reaching out to jamiek88 to confirm that the non-renewal was intentional.

Pay a bit more annually to a reputable DNS company. For example, I initially whet with GoDaddy, until about ten years ago when I read that they were shutting down people's domains simply upon a "we're investigating thisbperson, kill their domain" letter from the US Marshals (a Federal police force). Around the same time I heard about easyDNS in Canada, and discovered that they will only ever seize one of their customer's domains if they receive proper papers from a court---i.e. a search warrant. I like that they're committed to rule of law rather than politically motivated deplatforming.

I'm not jamiek88, I was just summarizing events, did you mean to reply to me?

> Namecheap immediately resold the domain to a squatter

No I don't see how their post allows one to infer that Namecheap "immediately" resold the domain. Their policy is a 30 day grace period, and within that 30 days the domain should become non functional, so if you're actively using it then you would know something is up.

Sounds like jamiek88 was squatting on a somewhat desirable domain and is just sad they couldn't follow some basic instructions.

I have no idea what the "because of COVID" thing is about.

I took it to mean that they got COVID and were out of commission long enough that the domain was sold by the time they “came back round to reality”.

I don't know about the relationship to Covid, but it sounds like the person's credit card wasn't charged, thus the domain wasn't renewed. After the missed renewal, a squatter bought the domain in hopes of selling back to the original owner (renter) at a premium.

I think the lesson here is prepay for a domain for several years ahead if you plan to keep the domain long-term.

Making sure that your domain registration is always current is not a difficult thing, though. You can register for fairly long periods of time, and set up multiple alerts to manually renew long before it expires.

My register doesn’t allow registrations longer than 1 year. Their reason: “ We've found that longer registration periods lead to a higher chance of customers losing or forgetting their account details or missing notifications and ultimately letting their domains expire due to outdated contact information or expired credit card details.”

I’m wondering whether that’s valid and if I should find a new registrar…

That is made up reason. Extension periods depend on TLD providers. I've just checked and e.g. OVH lets me renew .com domain until 2030. You max our renewal now, then setup some "domains housekeeping" day in your yearly calendar to puth the expiration date every year. Pity I can't do that with some proven and basic hosting to prepaid a few years ahead.

> My register doesn’t allow registrations longer than 1 year.

Ummm.. then maybe get a better registar? It's not like there aren't many to choose from.

I think you missed the last part of my comment.

The reasoning might well be valid in general, but only you can decide whether it's applicable to you or not.

FWIW, name.com lets me renew my domain for 10 years at a time, so it's definitely not something that all registrars do.

How do your have your outgoing mail configured? Up until recently Gmail would let you send email from another domain, but they seem to have shut this down.

I have my domain hosted on a service that provides web hosting and email. I configured Gmail to pickup that email and merge with my gmail mails. I can choose to send as either my gmail address or my personal domain address. I just tried it now and it worked just fine.

Also about cost? You could use proton, but gmail is free I guess.

To register a domain, you must provide an existing email address (not at that domain, of course). True story: I registered a domain with email from openmailbox.org. That email provider has closed, and my domain went puff with it.

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