I guess this is a cautionary tale.
I was recently having issues with my Gmail account that’s tied to my Epik ( a domain registrar ) account, so when I was supposed to renew my domain, I didn’t receive any e-mails about it. When I decided to randomly check on my website, it seemed to be down. So I checked Epik and a domain that usually cost £15 a year to renew now cost £400 to renew as it was expired.
As a teenager who does not have £400 to spend on a domain, I decided to just wait until the domain fully expired and buy it for a cheaper price.
After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did, and charged me £2,225 to renew the domain. I don’t understand how a price that large is justified, considering that my website gets barely any visitors and I basically only use the domain for hosting stuff. No idea how hiking prices this much is legal
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I’m glad I don’t care about the domain name. Just something easy to remember but I can always change it and tell the fam.
If I ever changed my email domains I’d have to go change a lot of online accounts.
It’s important if you’re building a brand, or if you’re dumb like me and run your own email server
Luckily for me I don’t need many email addresses and zoho will do something like 5 for free on your domain. Do you dislike running the email server? I don’t mind all the normal day-to-day upkeep of things, but is email some special kind of hell or something?
I like running my email server, because I justify it with my use cases.
If you like to spend time conversing with support about why your IP is on a blacklist, or why your email is being sent to spam (or outright rejected - I’m looking at you Microsoft), and then trying to increase your domain and IP reputations, be my guest.
Otherwise, a service is generally best
Did you ever get Microsoft to do anything other than tell you to register for the SNDS service, and then have them still silently drop your email regardless of whatever they claimed was going on?
I found that extra fun.
Nope. I’m not sure if I should be happy that I’m not the only one.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
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This was the plot to an episode of iCarly
if only we listened to spencer’s advice. always listen to spencer’s advice.
It’s legal because they bought the domain and they can charge whatever price they want if you want to buy it from them.
Time to grab sungloc.to instead?
sungloc.utus
Lesson learned, they regularly do this if you have a website that one of their crawlers hit as active. If you really care about it check in about a year later, chances are if you havent inquired within a year they’ll release the domain and you can pay normal sale price for it
Make an offer of $0.01. Assuming the responses aren’t automated, every time they reject it, raise the offer by 1c. Keep doing it till you hit the $15 mark and then just stop. It could waste literal years of their time.
Reminds me of a guy I knew who kept getting letters for a $10 parking fine he got while at university. He waited until they spent more in postage than the fine before paying it.
My last year of uni I was broke. The previous year the parking passes had red letters, that year purple. That was the only difference. The colour. I traced over all the letters of my previous parking pass with a blue sharpie and parked for free all year.
Nice hacking mate.
Automated numberplate recognition systems have spoilt so much fun.
I have my dream domain. It was being squatted for a similar amount. I offered £100 and it was declined, I offered £250 and they replied to tell me the domain is easily worth the £2K, well sort after etc. I told them that this is my surname, and I’m not a corporation with unlimited funds and they can take the offer or leave it. 15 minutes later the offer was accepted. I was so happy. Still am chuffed about it.
Where does the surname nooblet hail from?
Dang, I used to use Nooblet when playing crysis wars a long time ago. All the flying tanks kind of ruined it after a while, but it was nice to find a moderated server running Savanah and Battleground which had the Helis and VTOLs…
Nooblandia
Home of the noobles
I’ve lost my domain too. It took me two years to get it back. Hopefully it won’t be squatted for long
Damn you reminded me to check my gmail and there was a domain renewal reminder, thanks!
This happened to me years ago (the .com of my full name). I kept checking in at expiry date for 3 years and they eventually let it expire, so I bought it back for normal price.
This ☝️it happened to me and to a close friend, if you are reselient and can wait it is possible to but it back at regular price
Hopefully it’s not a common last name + a first name that suddenly became popular, could imagine it getting scooped by someone else.
Now would be a good time to look for a
.com
you like, or one of the more common TLDs. And register it at Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare. (Cloudflare is cheapest but all-eggs-in-one-basket is a concern for some.)Sadly, all the cheap or fun TLDs have a habit of being blocked wholesale, either because the cheap ones are overused by bad actors or because corporate IT just blacklists “abnormal” TLDs (or only whitelists the old ones?) because it’s “easy security”.
Notably, XYZ also does that 1.111B initiative, selling numbered domains for 99¢, further feeding the affordability for bad actors and justifying a flat out sinkhole of the entire TLD.
I got a three character XYZ to use as a personal link shortener. Half the people I used it with said it was blocked at school or work. My longer COM poses no issue.
Good news! .xyz is no longer the top malicious non-com/net/org domain.
It’s uh, .top now. https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/gtlds/domains/
So that explains why it’s so cheap.
Buy a different domain. Let them pay for this one until the end of time.
I simply don’t get why domain squatting is legal. On my ccTLD it is absolutely illegal meaning you have to forfeit the domain if you don’t use it anymore.
Just because you don’t have a website up at [XYZ].com doesn’t mean you’re not using it. You could have a domain controller on the back end doing file services, or you could be using it for network auth, etc. Not all .coms exist for the purpose of putting up a website.
I own 8 domains. Only one has HTTP/S ports open. The rest are for email and other services.
Other services will be reflected by active DNS records.
If the only DNS record points to a “Buy this domain” webpage, I think it’s fair to argue that is misuse.
Doubley so if it turns out many unrelated domains are owned by and point to the same webpage, and it’s just doing a js hostname thing to make it seem relevant to the current address
That’s fair.
Neither do .dk domains, but in order to determine use the courts will have to be involved. I haven’t heard about a lot of those cases, but I’d guess you can prove use against the person who wants to take the domain. If I have a domain called firstnamelastname.dk it’d be pretty easy to show that I got a mail address at contact@firstnamelastname.dk that’s in use.
Yep. I have one registered for professional email. I don’t host anything else.
I believe most regulated ccTLDs (not the ones sold to the higher bigger) actually do that.
I’ve been wanting a ccTLD domain that’s unused for a few years. The registrar suspended the domain (required contacts not updated) and put up a standard suspended notice, but doesn’t release the domain.
I guess the owner is a domain squatter and keeps paying the bill, so the registrar keeps getting paid. Easy money
*any email