A warning about expired domains

[Ms Naughty]

Just wanted to relate this morning's stress and the lesson learned.

I have over 100 domains and most of them auto-renew but I have some listed with a company that does not offer auto-renewal.

So I wasn't paying enough attention and one of my domains expired on the 17th June. It didn't help that said registrar did not send any warning emails about the expiration. In fact, the last email I got from them about the impending expiry was 2nd June.

Today I discovered that the domain is redirecting to an ad page. Cue panicked visit to registrar. I get a page that says "This domain is expired and cannot be renewed." Naturally I got rather grumpy because you're supposed to have 1 month's grace. Turns out you can renew via a "reactivation" link but it took a discussion with support for that to be made apparent.

So I wanted to post because I feel like there's a bit of unethical stuff going on with some registrars. They are probably making good money when this sort of thing happens. A domain with good traffic expires and they IMMEDIATELY switch the dns to their own server and start serving their own ads. Certainly they don't feel motivated to send out any warning emails when there's a bit of extra cash to be made.

Don't get me wrong - it is my own fault for being forgetful and to make matters worse it's the second time it's happened this year. I'll probably lose a good google listing thanks to this stuff up.

Even so, I feel that the lack of email alerts and immediate DNS change to ads is pretty dodgy. I think I'll be moving my domains to another registrar.

Just a heads up for others to check their renewal list and make sure their registrar does the right thing by them.