Domain Name Horror Story
Ok, maybe it’s not really “horror” but it was a horrible experience that wasted many hours of my life. Let me tell you all about it.
Once upon a time many moons ago when I first hit the interwebz I bought my very first domain name. It’s the site which has become my photography website.
Since then I have purchased website hosting and domain names from multiple companies. Set all my domain names to auto-renew. I get an email notice when the domain names are up for renewal and payments are processed automatically.
Little did I realize . . .
When I bought 204EastSouth.com I did so through some fly-by-night outfit called Name Registrars. This was 14 years ago. I registered my domain name for 14 years when I bought it and after all that time I’d simply lost track of the fact that it wasn’t registered with one of companies I used regularly. More importantly, it wasn’t set to auto-renew.
One day my website suddenly went down and I had no idea why. I’m not going through the process here, but when the site when down I started all the troubleshooting procedures which eventually lead me to discover that my domain name had expired. Logging in to Midphase (where the site was hosted at the time) I found the domain wasn’t registered there.
I searched through old emails and figured out 204EastSouth.com was registered at Name Registrars.
This is why you keep all emails you get from companies which are associated with setting up your website. Create a folder and save them all. You never know when something like this will happen to you. I know you think you will remember. You will not.
Why do I classify Name Registrars as fly-by-night?
- No phone number to contact them.
- No live chat to contact them.
- They sent no notifications that my domain name was about to expire.
- They ignored multiple emails to all three email addresses which are listed on the website.
- Twenty-four hours after I paid for renewal they still hadn’t actually renewed my domain name.
Digging deeper I discovered that another company is actually the register for 204EastSouth.com. That company would be OLM.net. Name Registrars is simply a facade company.
I found this out when I went to PayPal (I renewed the domain name at the Name Registrars site via PayPal) and filed a dispute. The dispute process allowed me to contact the recipient of my money directly and that’s when I discovered OLM existed.
Eventually things got sorted out and my domain name renewed.
After Action Report:
- My site was down for three days.
- Traffic to my site has of course plummeted and will take some amount of time to recover.
- During this time all my email accounts at this domain were not receiving mail of course.
- I subsequently transferred 204EastSouth.com to another company I do regular business with.
Today’s Lesson
- Know who provides you with what.
- Know when it expires.
- Know what you have to do to renew it.
- Research a company before you give them your money.
I learned this the hard way so you don’t have to. You are most welcome.