
Moniker Deactivated My Domain 26 Days Before The Expiration Date - petercooper
http://peterc.org/blog/2010/345-moniker-deactivation.html
======
patio11
Sorry you had to go through that nuisance. Can I make one suggestion with
regards to business processes? You currently appear to have domain renewals
done shortly in advance of need, with manual scheduling. _This is a source of
risk._ There are a _lot_ of failure modes there, including "my registrar
fubars the renewal", and many of them have unpleasant consequences.

Domain names are cheap and abandonment is infrequent and unlikely to save much
money, for most people on HN. So renew them early, for long terms. For your
business or blog or other domain which will be a going concern for the
foreseeable future, go renew it for ten years. If your business gets sold to
Amazon tomorrow, oh well, that cost you only $60 ~ $80 or so.

I own a small stable of domains (a few dozen) and keep most of them on rolling
two year registrations, with my main ones (product sites, my blog, etc) on
rolling five year registrations. I renew all of them yearly. This way,
screwups by myself, my bank, Paypal, or GoDaddy probably won't deprive me of
use of my property.

~~~
petercooper
This is good advice. But.

I agree with the gist of your point. I follow this process with some important
domains because most TLDs are cheap. At ~$75-$99 per year (depending on
registrar), _.io_ is not cheap and it made no sense to cashflow at the time to
throw years on it, especially as I hadn't made my mind up whether to jump to
the .com I own before launch (seriously considering this now). That's my lame
excuse ;-)

That aside, I'm fastidious with my calendar and delegated my responsibility by
marking to renew the domain in late December prior to the expiry date. This is
close to the line but still reasonably before it and this issue is something
Moniker needs to clear up in its TOS or similar (Moniker even sent frequent
e-mails telling me when it expired with no warning of this deactivation date.)
Since I've not actually "launched" yet, I'm not baying for blood - just an
improvement in their service.

~~~
dustingetz
this and other failure modes are now in your control. monkier may be
irresponsible, but their service looks sufficient for your needs.

~~~
petercooper
If you mean, "I've learned my lesson" then yes. However, they still need to
clear things up because not everyone else is going to know they do this and
others probably have more important, revenue generating domains than mine ;-)

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jacquesm
hey Peter,

Mail this guy: monte@corp.moniker.com

His full name is Monte Cahn, he's only going to be there for another 3 weeks
or so so move while you can. (he started Moniker.com).

That should get your stuff sorted out in no time flat, Monte is _very_ serious
about preserving the reputation of the company he built, and has been even
after selling to oversee.net.

If that does not get you sorted out fast enough to your liking let me know
(j@ww.com).

~~~
petercooper
Thanks, Jacques. Moniker's Twitter agent has told me they have escalated this
case but it can't hurt to just give him a heads up!

(Luckily, I'm not baying for blood, I just want them to clear this up so both
I and others won't get caught out by this undocumented policy again.)

------
geedee77
Why are people so quick to blog about problems before trying to get them
solved? The article clearly states that it was only after posting the original
that the Moniker agent was contacted, isn't that the first port-of-call?

I had a similar situation recently where I cancelled my auto-renewal 6 months
before the renewal date and my site was pulled (even though I'd paid for the
year). I could've blogged about it and tried to encourage everyone not to use
the provider, but I just contacted them direct and got a quick resolution.
Maybe if I'd had no response I'd have tried to make it public but there was no
need as it was a simple mistake.

It seems to me that these days people want to shout out their problems far too
quickly rather than try and get them fixed. This is a strange way of getting
things resolved.

~~~
wccrawford
When you've got a problem that is destroying your business, -any- time that
you're forced to wait for them to contact you back is costing you money.

I don't blame him for reaching out to every available outlet while he waits.

In this case, he's already got at least 1 post that gives him someone else to
contact in the company and get noticed.

And there's probably someone that works there that reads HN, so that's another
thing in his favor.

------
dreyfiz
Yikes. I use Moniker too, and this hasn't ever happened to me. I thought they
were better than that.

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ra
I've had some __very __bad experiences with Moniker in the past.

I would even go so far as to say they are untrustworthy.

~~~
jacquesm
Can you be more specific ? I've been a moniker customer for many years now and
have a fairly large number of domains under my control, between myself and
related companies about 50,000 of them or so, not a single complaint to date
except for two minor technical issues which were dealt with quite fast.

~~~
drats
Your definition of untrustworthy and shady may be a bit lower than that of ra
if you are in the type of business that holds 50k domains. I mean seriously,
what's your business model with 50k domains? Or are you like one of the
hosting companies that offers a free domain with an online service?

~~~
jacquesm
> Your definition of untrustworthy and shady may be a bit lower than that of
> ra if you are in the type of business that holds 50k domains.

Thanks for playing mr. Anonymous, I don't think what I do for a living is a
secret around here and _did_ mention that that was a combined number between
myself and a number of other companies.

If you're clueless about something the polite thing to do is to ask rather
than to make insinuations.

~~~
drats
Well I did ask in my last sentence, and you haven't answered. I didn't then
but I have now gone to your projects; I see reocities, the ww/webcam thing and
your blog. I don't see anything like bluehost or linode provisioning domains
to users. The reason for the slight snark at the start of my message I suppose
is that it's hard to find a domain and yet in every thread like this you get a
few people confessing to hoarding hundreds or even thousands. Sorry for being
sceptical, and curious, about what you could possible need 50k domains for:
you'll have to spell it out for me or ignore me I suppose.

~~~
jacquesm
Would a 45K servers co-location facility meet your requirements?

Or a couple of domain re-sellers that sell domains as part of their hosting
package? (that use Moniker as their 'upstream').

> that it's hard to find a domain

I've never had that problem. You mean that you find it hard to find 'single
word' or 'perfect descriptions' of common ideas, and that's true, but I'm
fairly sure that you can find plenty of good domain names for exactly $8.

The value of a domain is directly proportional to the amount of time that you
put in to it. Usually the people that complain about there not being any
'free' domains are really complaining that they can't get the domains they
want. Not realizing perhaps that if the person currently holding their desired
domain would not be holding it surely someone else would.

There are all kinds of arguments for/against holding a large number of
domains, my own criterion has always been that if my idea isn't worth the
$8/year fee for a domain then I should not even bother to write it out. If you
come by 6 weeks later and have the same idea, and through sheer coincidence
decide on the same name then you will have to be just a little bit more
creative, but we all agree the value is in the execution, not in the domain
name.

Google.com was worth $8 when they got it first, and at that time the same
complaint was often heard.

It's like the DNS variation on the HN/Reddit theme, and I figure as long as
the DNS is the prevalent method of locating hosts this will continue to be the
case.

In a few years time all the 6 letter domains will be gone, etc. But there are
an awful lot of possibilities there, 300M+, someone did some work to prove
just how likely it is that some pronounceable domain is gone:

[http://semmyfun.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-is-probability-
tha...](http://semmyfun.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-is-probability-that-
pronounceable.html)

For 7 letters (which is really quite short) that does not look all that bad to
me.

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mbreese
This seems to me to be a problem with TLD based names. They all have different
policies for this stuff. I once had to recover a .SE name due to a situation
just like this. I had planned to re-register a name, but fell within a strange
situation where my domain was still mine, but outside of a 60 day window when
I could actually renew the domain. This was all in advance of the actual
expiration date. Because of this, the domain lapsed and I had to have the
registrar recover the domain manually.

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quellhorst
I wonder if they want to check how much traffic a domain gets before it
expires so they can snatch up the good ones.

~~~
jacquesm
Oversee (monikers parent company) is not godaddy or enom. At least, not yet...

~~~
calloc
I have over 3000 domains on GoDaddy and I've never had an issue with them
taking a domain and putting ads on it before it expired.

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benatkin
I think this should be the normal way of doing things. I cringe when I hear
about people renewing domain names _after_ they expired. I think the records
should be changed prior to the domains expiring so they could hard-expire X
years after being registered and people would know exactly when they _really_
need to renew them.

But, of course, since it's not in their TOS, and isn't either the normal way
of doing things or stated _very loud and clear_ during the registering
process, it's unacceptable.

~~~
Terretta
You think _deleting_ the registration _before_ it expires should be normal?

~~~
benatkin
No, I think changing the DNS _before_ it expires should be normal. Changing
the DNS to a tacky parked page is often the only thing that gets peoples'
attention, including highly competent people. I think if DNS changed 30 days
before N years after the registration date, it would get people to extend the
registration before the official expiry date. The date that DNS changes would
be a date that the domain owner would get warned about.

Having a window after the official expiration date that few people know isn't
elegant to me. Also in the vast majority of cases, if it's valuable to keep a
domain 11 months after registering it, it's valuable to keep it longer.

~~~
slouch
unbelievable--if i renew my domain with one day to spare every year without
any mistake or delay in payment, you believe my websites should be
interrupted! for what, besides being on time?

~~~
benatkin
For your own good. If dhh can delay renewing rubyrails.com until the domain
gets cut off, many of us can forget to renew our much less important names!

~~~
aberkowitz
For your own good, domain registrars should contact you, by email, well in
advance of an expiration. Worst case scenario, the name is held by the
registrar for the grace period and the former owner has exclusive rights to it
during that term.

~~~
jacquesm
Moniker actually sense out these emails regular like clockwork.

A sample:

# 0 Domains Pending Deletion - [ RENEW NOW ]

# 0 Domains Pending Deactivation

# 0 Domains Expiring Within 7 Days

# 51 Domains Expiring Within 35 Days

# 146 Domains Expiring Within 75 Days

So they actually start warning more than two months in advance.

