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Losing my domain and then getting it back
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May 9th, 2008 by 
Jay Westerdal
I almost lost my domain permanently because I was unaware it was expiring. I got an alert from our new Registrant Alert system on DomainTools and it saved my ass. I am extremely thankful we invented this system. It is nice to have an example I can point to so soon after launching the service. The alert told me that “Registercom” now owned my domain. That was a huge tip off that the registrar was about to delete my domain. I had won the domain in a Snapnames auction in 2007 and it was sitting at Register.com
account that Snapnames opened for me because they Register.com was the old registrar. I normally keep at one registrar that has an auto-renew feature and nothing in my account deletes. However I didn’t remember to transfer this domain over to my normal registrar after I won the domain in the auction.
With this Registrant alert I was able to see I had lost the domain, so therefore and was able to quickly act and get the domain back by renewing it. It would have sucked if I had needed to go to auction to get my domain back. When buying domains at multiple registrar I would highly recommend setting an alert on yourself.
Registrant Alert
The system spots strings that are Newly place on a whois record which were not on the previous historical record.� The system now supports the exact opposite too; It will alert you if your strings get removed from a current whois record. I have set a few alerts on public domainers and I see when they buy or sell domains.
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Posted in Domain Tools Updates, Registrant Alert |
29 Comments »
May 10th, 2008 at 3:03 am
a tool to protect yourself from your own incompetance
May 10th, 2008 at 6:46 am
I lost my domain and it wasnt even expiring. From Register.com
… Not sure what any monitoring tool could do to help:
Its my first/last name domain and Register.com
began sending warnings to me to renew my registration in August 2001. It wasnt supposed to expire until Dec-2001. I have screen prints of such as well. I ignore these emails because I thought it was similar to magazines that want you to renew because “your subscription will be expiring in 10 months” (!) you’ve all seen these I am sure. Well, in Sep-2001 they gave the domain to another person with the same name as myself and I lost the domain. Not only that, their incompetents at customer noservice refused to acknowledge any wrong-doing. I dropped the issue, but if I knew then what I know now I would have raised a major stink about that.
Yea, I know its 7 years ago but it still burns me up AND I dont think any monitoring tool would have helped. It would have just notified me of what I eventually found out and was able to do nothing to remedy it.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Jay,
I had the identical experience a few months ago with Name Server Spy which I use to monitor the Name Servers of some of our divisions which are not under central control. In this case the registrar was Network Solutions and Name Server Spy reported that the DNS entry had changed to PENDINGRENEWALDELETION.COM
. The WhoIs record did not have a valid Email account so the expiration notification was never received. Tools like Registrant Alert or Name Server Spy can cover Domains which slip through the cracks. Until I received the Name Server Spy alert I had not realized that it could detect Domains which were pending deletion. These tools are you Omega Defense which come trough when all else fails.
Once Domain Tools can support prepaid corporate accounts I am planning to use Registrant Alert and Name Server Spy aggressively monitor all corporate resources including those I believe to be 100% safe because two weeks ago I discovered another small exception, like you, the hard way. In large corporations the most dangerous situations occur in areas where you are convinced that you have complete control.
You should put together a document which addresses risk scenarios and how Domain Tools products can address them. Unless you have been through the learning experience, the connections are not always that obvious.
Mike
May 10th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
michael91806 Said:
“You should put together a document which addresses risk scenarios and how Domain Tools products can address them. Unless you have been through the learning experience, the connections are not always that obvious.”
Maybe a FAQ with some war stories.
May 11th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
That is the reason I am with godaddy they have automatic reminders and it is locked and if someone else wants that domain they send you a e-mail with a link in it to comfirm it
May 11th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
jrg12345 Said:
“That is the reason I am with godaddy they have automatic reminders and it is locked and if someone else wants that domain they send you a e-mail with a link in it to comfirm it”
That’s good up until the domain expires like Jay’s did. Once it expires your account no longer controls the domain so you won’t get notices and email is fickle, too.
Your spam software and the email host’s spam software might start blocking certain emails or your mail host might just lose or corrupt your account. Or the host starts blocking a domain, IP, or forwarding might quit. Then you don’t get the emails.
This tool Jay (Domain Tools) has is just another level of protection and a perfect “last bastion of domain protection” when needed.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:06 am
This is why consolidating domains from multiple registrars within a tool like DNZoom can be a lifesaver. Forget having to check half a dozen registrar accounts, all your domains are listed in one place along with a countdown for names expiring soon.
Most registrars are good at sending renewal reminders, but if you have a lot of names, or names that are registered with an old email address, it’s easy to let names expire by accident.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
You’re lucky! I know many whose domain-expiring alerts were forwarded to their Spam/Junk folders.
I would prefer SMS type alerts, if possible. Email alerts are not enough.
In any case, making a note of it in your calendar is the best way to avoid all this. I do it all the time and its never failed.
Arul
http://aruljohn.com
May 13th, 2008 at 8:15 am
can someone book more than 100 domains ?
Is it not cyber squatting ?
is it not a crime ?
May 13th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Jay,
It happened with me 3 days back. One of my client’s domain registered with http://dotster.com expired on 22-April-08. He was traveling so couldn’t renew it. When he tried to renew it on 10-May-08 (i.e. 18 days from domain expiry), it had disappeared from his control panel. I checked at domaintools.com
and found that it was transfered to some third party on 01-May-08 (i.e. 8 days from domain expiry).
We were shocked to read response from customer care at http://dotster.com. This is what they wrote back, “Your domain had expired and is past the 30 day grace period. Your domain expired, was bid on, and registered by someone else. We are sorry for the unfortunate circumstances and would like to assist, if possible.”
Not only this, they shamelessly offered us a part of the net proceeds of the sale money of the domain.
Can you help us? I can send the domain name to you through email.
May 16th, 2008 at 6:49 am
rockclimba: I’ve got 122 domains, with several variants to protect my branding… and most are projects in various stages of completion. Am I a criminal or cybersquatter? Nope. Do I need 36 hours in a day? Yes!
I’ve never lost a domain. it all boils down to either paying ahead for several years (yay, get a discount!) or paying attention. I have a knack for remembering numbers, and so these things aren’t so hard for me. But I don’t remember everything, so I have all my domains at one registrar (godaddy in this case). And if I get up close on one domain expiring, I’ll typically look ahead 30-60 days and get those others out of the way.
Here’s probably the best solution to the problem… one great option is the “consolidate” feature some registrars offer (godaddy comes to mind). I’m able to make my .coms have the same expiration date by buying a fractional year renewal. This way if one is going, I know the others need to be renewed too. I set it to my birthday and so there’s little chance I’ll forget.
Not trying to plug godaddy here, but their services can be very helpful in managing a lot of domains. Most registrars have a lot of these same features in some form or another. And if yours doesn’t, perhaps you should change registrars?
Just My 2 pence.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
@jrg12345, that’s exactly what happened in my godaddy.com
experience. My domain arborlaw.com
expired without warning because I had renewed it a few months earlier but apparently the renewal didn’t ‘take’ through the control panel. (I had actually group-renewed a bunch of emails and checked the arborlaw.com
renewal checkbox along with the rest of the domains, all the rest renewed ok…this was the only valuable one with all the inbound links that a squatter would want…but that’s a different story.)
Originally I thought my renewal warning emails were caught by a spam filter. I am rehosted now at .biz and I picked up all the gTLDs of my name. In the process of doing that (at GoDaddy.com
) I noticed that “whoa!!” — the NIC handles for the brand-new domains were being populated with the OLD EMAIL ADDRESS used by me when I originally transferred the domain to godaddy.com
several years ago. This old info was changed many moons ago on my general account with godaddy.com
, as well as on the arborlaw.com
registration (which had expired). I had to go back in and manually override the old email addresses, but not before I snapshotted those screens — unbelievable.
The domain I lost was transferred in late March to a squatter who posted links in direct competition to me and my trademark. I got that squatter shut down pretty quickly (GoDaddy was extremely quick and helpful with that). So of course the squatter (WebContents, Inc.) cancelled the registration which sent the name out towards the available pool.
GoDaddy of course suggested helpfully that I backorder through them to regain the now-cancelled domain name, since they were still the registrar for the squatter. I did lots of research on name dropping and drop catchers (none of the info out there is very good because the state of the art in drop catching is a moving target). Several sites and blog posts indicated that where that registrar has a captive drop catcher (Godaddy has TDNAM), backordering will result in a successful catch because they will drop internally prior to releasing — but just in case — good idea to register with a drop catcher or two. So, I backordered.
As a GoDaddy representative cheerfully told me in the upsell: “there’s always a remote chance some other registrar will get it, but since we are dropping it, it’s extremely likely that we will catch it, and we don’t allow multiple backorders, so you are the only godaddy customer who can get it”. I also bid at pool. Snapnames caught it on behalf of Mr. Abu Murad of Chittagong, Bangladesh, who promptly scoured archive.org
for my old article content. He has posted that, along with some of my current articles (now hosted at arborlaw.biz
), using the same graphic design as my blog.
I find it AMAZING that with all the upsell, I was NEVER ONCE OFFERED CONSOLIDATION of renewal dates. Is that because…….they make the majority of their registrar money from speculators? No, that couldn’t be it, could it.
The moral of the story: your registration is only as good as your registrar and your registrar’s practices. Sounds like Domaintools is much more accommodating. Even though I am renewed forward for 2 years on everything I am shopping for a new registrar.
Carol Shepherd, Arborlaw PLC
arborlaw.biz
May 17th, 2008 at 6:42 am
They do have a link in the control panel that lets you consolidate your domain names it costs $.75 per domain per month and you can for example if you know you will be out of town you can extend the renewal date by 1-8 months depending when they expire. that is a good deal. i do not know another company that does that.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Domain consolidation may not have been offered as it only is offered for .com, net’s and you may have had other tld’s it would not have worked for you. Another draw back is you can ony condlidate a domain name 1 time a year. I have had great success with it and for .75 per month, to make my .com, .net expire same date as my .org’s.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
While I may not be on target with your conversation, I am looking for help – a woman charged me $10,000 to upgrade my website. She told me it had to be in her name while she did the work. She couldn’t do the work and now steadfast refuses to turn the website and url back to me. Does anyone have any suggestions to help me? She has her name listed on whois, so the hosting company can’t help me, even though I paid for the site/url before she stole it.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
dunfudgin,
That’s like putting the good ole Beemer in your mechanic’s name so he can change the oil. Or having the dentist adopt your child before fitting him with braces.
Hire a lawyer who can investigate this and maybe get your site back.
There’s a site called the wayback machine that might help you prove your previous ownership. And DomainTools can show the history of the domain ownership and DNS changes.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Last Thursday, without warning, enameco pulled the plug on my domain, for reasons I’ve never been able to ascertain. I tried visiting their website — gone. Tried emailing them — emails bounced or went unanswered. Tried phoning them. First number was disconnected. Second number reached an employee, left him six voice mails, all of which went unanswered. Third number reached the main office. An automated greeting. “Operator assistance … Sorry, no one is available to answer the call. Please leave a message.” Then: “Sorry, there is no space to leave a message.”
After hitting this brick wall, I tried to switch my registrar. I was astonished at the insurmountable roadblocks I faced. I spoke with a customer service representative for the company that handles new registrations for GoDaddy.com
and SpinWeb. The fellow there told me I was essentially out of luck for 60 days. Because enameco placed a “register lock” on my domain, putting it on “register hold,” it couldn’t be switched to another registrar.
SuhasRao
May 30th, 2008 at 5:41 am
I am domain manager for my company, and I love the domain monitor feature. It has helped me quite a few times from having one accidently slip through the cracks. The only think I would like to see is for the sorting feature work with over 2000. The message I get is that I have to keep my porfolio under 2000 in order to sort them, so does that mean I can only have 2000 all together, or in a single portfolio? Right now I have more than 2000, and it would be great to be able to sort them out. Jay, I just love your website; I use it constantly. Keep up the good work.
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