Domain locked down, no warning

[Kev Williams]

Last night around 10pm I try to send email, it won't send. Try to email myself from my gmail address, it bounces.

Same this morning. A whois check shows my domain is in "Client Hold".

The problem: they ran my card a month ago to renew. The card they ran was hacked about a year and a half ago, and replaced. Last renew was 2 years ago.

While I get a "website stats" report email at least once a week, I got zilch from them about my card being declined. No mail, no phone call, no nothing.

As of last night it was removed from the DNS database and put in "redemption period". To reinstate it cost me an extra $160 ...

That was nearly 4 hours ago, I'm still dead in the water. No email, website, nothing...

[Jim Becker]

Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to keep track of credit card numbers that are pinned to "out of sight" things like a domain registration. It's also likely that any courtesy period for your card provider on the old number passed already since the issue with the number was a year and a half back. And your registrar probably has this happen so much (due to domain fraud) that they stopped bothering to notify when a transaction didn't go through...that's a poor business practice. I know my provider is really anal about reminding folks to check the card on file well before a scheduled transaction. Hopefully, things will get back up and running reasonably quickly. I made a change to one of my domains last week and the name servers updated relatively quickly by all appearances, but it can take 24-48 hours to fully complete the updates after your reinstatement.

[Sean Troy]

Sounds like a sub par hosting company. I use three different hosting companies and always get at least a months notice when it's renewal time and I make sure the CC on file is up to date.

[Brett Luna]

My host also communicates well on renewals...plus, I have my accounts set for manual renewal so I'm more likely to catch issues like that.

[Bert Kemp]

my host gives me a 90 day warning then a 30 day warning