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
Sorry, but chalk this up to lesson learned. It’s almost always been this way. Domain squatters will do this all the time. In fact, some domain registrars will use you searching their site for an ‘available’ domain, and if you don’t buy it up right away – will buy it and hike the price and sit on it for years in order to lock it down, knowing you wanted it.
btw, Namecheap says Sunglocto dot com is like $10 - so just register a .com. Not through that Epik piece of shit that you used before. Legit, use Namecheap; they’ve never done me wrong and have been my registrar for more than a decade now.
Time to register that domain before OP gets it…
Gohddzsx?
I prefer to be called daddy. Godaddy
Have also had good experience using namecheap for years.
Namecheap is alright, but Cloudflare only charges at cost with no markup.
Then they make you use them for DNS. May or may not be a big deal, but the reason it’s at cost is to act as a loss leader to get you exposed to and buying their other products.
Their free services are extremely useful and you can’t find that anywhere else. I’ve used them for years with hundreds of domains and never paid them a single dime.
Thirded for Namecheap.
I mean, I use namecheap. I’m thinking about throwing one of my domains onto cloudfare just in case.
If you don’t like namecheap, some people have been suggesting porkbun or something.
I had this happen with NameCheap. I’m not sure if they bought it or someone else, but it stayed registered with them. Whoever bought it has held it for a couple years, put up a fake website to look like they were using it, but took it down after a year when I didn’t bite on buying it. Current status shows it’s pending deletion finally for abuse or non-payment. I keep checking to see when I can nab it again.
It happens with anyone. Bots track expirations and snatch them so that they can ransom them back to you for thousands - exactly as in OPs example.
AUTO RENEW. Auto-renew. Auto-renew is the way. The solution to this problem is Auto-renew.
Yes, I just didn’t realize that auto-renew doesn’t work with PayPal on NameCheap and had lazily set it up with PayPal when I got it because I didn’t want to go get my wallet. Lesson learned!
I think you can also register 10 years in advance, or maybe more depending on the registrar, which would cover all other potential snafus like expired card info.
So search for a lot of domains at random to cost them some money?
Absolutely. But I think it might be more advanced than that. They might have some sort of analytics that measures how long people stay on the page, etc to inform their purchasing decisions.
Ah, so search a couple of domains and sit on their page for a while making random mouse movements and scrolls then? Got it.
Bots would help but have their own problems.
Namecheap has extra rules if you want to use an API (minimum money spent with them, minimum of domains managed with them etc.) — GoDaddy style.
Keep that in mind, if you need an API (for DDNS or for obtaining wildcard TLS certificates) you’ll have to use a separate service for DNS.
DDNS with Namecheap is as simple as hitting a URL with a /GET request from the IP you want it to point to. No limitations. No special requirements.
I have a script running that uses the Namecheap API to automatically get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt. I didn’t pay a dime for this. Did something change?
Maybe you meet the conditions for it? It hasn’t been possible to access their API without meeting the conditions for at least a year now.
You don’t pay directly for the API, the latest conditions AFAIR are 20+ domains and $50+ on account balance and $50+ spent in the last 2 years.
They also want you to whitelist the IPs that access the DNS which makes it unusable for DynDNS, but at least they have a separate URL for that.
+1 for namecheap. They’ve been reliable and fair to me for years.
Got a work related variant, a 3 letter domain we really liked was registered by a person asking a couple of hundred bucks or so. Which really was a good deal and we were more then happy to pay.
Our IT department advised guiding the transfer themselves. Instead our marketing department went ahead anyway and just agreed to “you end your subscription and after that we register it” … instead of using transfer codes.
In the minutes between, a bulk claimer snatched it away.
OMG. I can’t believe the marketing department was that inept. Tragic
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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
GoDaddy is known to do that.
Technically, they’re not hiking the price. GoDaddy
boughtscalped it after it expired and then is re-selling it at an astronomically higher price. It’s one of the many, many reasons people hate them.I’m ashamed to say I still have a couple of domains with GD that I haven’t migrated yet. This post might just light a fire under me to get that done.
tldr - lesson learned. buy a new domain and move over to it.
but for those who want to learn something new - you are only renting your domains. If you fail to pay by the registration date then you generally get a grace period to pay more money to renew it. If you fail to pay before that period expires then the domain will be released. Some companies like godaddy will automatically buy the domain for another year (or more). But even if Godaddy doesn’t then it still goes up on a list of expiring domains and there are backorder services that will try to buy the domain or auction them off.
So in the end it doesn’t really matter what registrar you use. If you do not pay, it goes back to a list where people can see it is expiring and then you’ll get some people who either want to legitimately use that domain or more likely they are wanting to try to sell it to you or someone else for more than they buy it for.
And I saw someone mention file a complaint. I’m sorry to say that if you did not have money to renew the domain then you aren’t going to be able to do that either. This is called Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and the fee is between $1500-4000 for 1 to 5 domains.. Additionally, just because you file a complaint does not mean the issue will be resolved favorably or timely. These complaints can last years, and there is no guarantee you will get the domain back.
This is why you should always pay your domain rental fee. And if you don’t, then you need to either be willing to pay a ton of money to get it back or you will need to move on. Sorry its a tough lesson to learn but if you’re just a student then you probably weren’t using this to run a business or anything so in the end you are quite fortunate.
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.
Automated numberplate recognition systems have spoilt so much fun.
Nice hacking mate.
Don’t pay this! You just reinforce their predatory practices. How renewals at much higher prices are allowed - no clue!
Something similar happened to a company I know - it expired and was immediately bought by domain squatters, when they found them they were told that it couldn’t be sold back because the squatter had paid $XXXX for and had big plans (I assume it was BS, just a premise to get paid - no site was ever put on the domain)
Solution: they bought the .org version and bought the .com back a year later.
edit:grammar
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I knew GoDaddy is somehow involved as soon as I saw the title.
network solutions does this too, search a domain on their site, comeback a month and now they own it and will sell it to you of course. not sure if they still do,but I know for fact they did years back.
Buy a different domain. Let them pay for this one until the end of time.
You can file a complaint if they just squat on it. Godaddy is terrible
I’ve always wondered how well that actually works. Anyone go through this process?
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.
Damn you reminded me to check my gmail and there was a domain renewal reminder, thanks!
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
Sounds like you’re in the UK, if so I’d recommend legit companies run by old nerds like Mythic Beasts: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/domains
Now would be a good time to look for a
.comyou 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.
After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did,
Oh yeah, that’s what happens when you pick scammy domain registrars. It is very possible that Epik auctioned your domain (after wall they kept it after the expiry date and payed fees) and then GoDaddy snatched it. This is what usually happens.
Not just scammy
Epik is an American domain registrar and web hostingcompany known for providing services to alt-tech websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist materials. It has been described as a “safehaven for the extreme right” because of its willingness to provide services to far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik
I’m in no way surprised at what they did, and in fact only surprised that it wasn’t them that bought the expired domain, but instead was godaddy
You’re missing the point, it wasn’t bought by godaddy. Epik auctioned the domain to godaddy after it expired, it’s common for registrars to sell domains to each other so they don’t get a bad reputation and make people think what you’re thinking.
Great to know, wouldn’t wanna be associated with someone who seems to specialize in far-right businesses.
Interesting, had to check and see: 4chan is registered with Cloudflare.
A part of me would rather these baby Hitlers operating in the open in case it’s harder for the FBI to follow them around the dark web. Downside is clearnet makes it easier for low-braincell nazis to communicate. Woulda thought we’d have socially stomped out extremism by now so doing it technologically wouldn’t be necessary…
Alas.
