

Should we trust .ly/local domains for our startups? - brackin

I just received an email from Letter.ly, the premium newsletter service founded by Sam Lessen. I'll paste the contents but essentially they can't renew their .ly domain.<p>It's really got me thinking about how registering a local domain such as this is risky, especially with companies like bit.ly relying on them for all of their business. I own a .io domain but have a .com backup which everyone should probably think about when buying a .ly or similar domain.<p>"hello letterly authors,<p>last week, the agency that we used to register the letter.ly domain was taken down as a side effect of the war in libya (.ly is the libyan top level domain). our domain registration expired, and we were unable to renew it. as the expiration propagated, the site appeared to be dead and emails sent to your subscribers probably bounced.<p>1) sorry for the hassle. it's amazing that a physical war has affected our service in this way.<p>2) we are now letterly.net. this means that you will send emails to secretcode@letterly.net instead of secretcode@letter.ly, and new subscribers should be directed to letterly.net/yoururl".
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sorbus
There's also a rather longer discussion on the same event at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406681>

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ohashi
I think you need to consider what country you're doing business with. Libya
was never exactly a 'friend' of the west. Risking your entire business to have
some strange extension (I don't see the appeal personally, but to each their
own) seems somewhat foolish. There are gTLDs (com) which avoid all these
issues along with stable countries that are far more trusted if you really
want a ccTLD (de, ca, etc)

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andrewpi
FYI: Ben Metcalfe warned about problems with .ly domains back in October 2010.
(see [http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-
to-b...](http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-to-be-
considered-unsafe/))

~~~
ig1
As discussed at the time Ben was hosting adult links which were specifically
forbidden by the registrar policy. It's no different to the US seizing domains
used for illegal activities.

War breaking out certainly wasn't on people's agenda as a reason for not
buying a domain (although maybe it should have been).

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timerickson
I will not comment on wether one should rely on .ly domains, but I wanted to
point out it is STILL POSSIBLE to order and update the nameservers of .LY
domains.

I did so by emailing lydomains@libyanspider.com

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bmelton
I think that the takeaway from that post, for me, was that IF you absolutely
can't have another registrar, it's probably worthwhile to purchase your domain
in long, multi-year chunks, and be prepared to have thrown that money away if
they ever take it out from under you.

Obviously, this doesn't speak to whether or not it's 'safe', but Letterly has
illustrated that, at least presently, the 'point of failure' is at the
registrar. Other (not-expired) .ly domains seem to be resolving just fine,
which is the point of DNS of course, and it's safe to say that if they hadn't
already been up for renewal, they'd likely be safe until they were.

As it stands, I don't even know if there are any registrars selling .ly
domains, or if it's simply their registrar that's having issues.

~~~
brackin
Thanks for the reply, Agreed, I suppose it makes a lot more sense to buy a
domain like this in such a way. I'm not sure if they are selling them at the
moment but it's interesting.

