Earlier this week I had a client call in (we’ll call him Bob for this post) to tell me that his company’s email wasn’t working. He was able to send, but was not able to receive email. We received an alert from our round-trip email monitoring system around the same time he called in. After some quick troubleshooting I figured out that their domain name had expired.
I did a quick who-is look-up to ascertain who their registrar was; it was all downhill from there… Bob had purchased the domain name 10 years ago from when he first went into business. He used an ISP email account he no longer had access to, which explains why he missed all of the notification emails. He had no idea what the login credentials were, and all of the domain’s whois contact records (administrative, technical) were pointed at the old ISP email address. Then to make things even worse, the listed registrar was actually a reseller for a different registrar. Getting the credentials to log into the registrars site took over four hours. That’s four hours that email was down for the entire company…
In order to prove that Bob was the rightful owner of the domain, the registrar required that Bob fax in a copy of the original articles of incorporation (which I’m sure he had right on hand…) After we sent that in, it took the registrar two additional hours to allow us to get into the account. There were no options to expedite the process (not even paid options), they wouldn’t renew it over the phone, and they wouldn’t do a temporary 14 day renewal like other registrars do. (Go Daddy for instance).
Here’s the best part: When the domain name expired they changed the DNS servers back to their default servers. That was just about finished propagating when we finally got into the account. I immediately changed them back to the correct DNS servers, but then that took HOURS to propagate.
All in all it took nearly a full business day to get them back up and running. What should have been a 5 minute log in and renew, turned out to be an 8+ hour fiasco. I can’t help myself but ask “What could we have done to prevent this?”
We go to such great lengths to monitor virtually every aspect of an Exchange Server and email flow; how could we let something like this slip by? We manage and renew domain names for several of our clients, but most take care of it on their own. They get the renewal emails, and most of the time they take care of it themselves. We’ve had clients let them slip before and getting them back online was a trivial blip.
Post mortem thoughts:
domainbank.com is THE WORST worst registrar’s I’ve had to deal with. “We only push out DNS changes every 4 hours”.
I also setup an account at domaintools.com. They have a domain name monitoring server I’m going to try to out. I’ll write a review on (if?) how it works later. If you have any first hand experience with them I’d love to hear it.