Company forgot to renew its domain name, which expired December 23.
Add FreshDirect.com to a long list of companies that suffered downtime thanks to not renewing their domain names.
The company suffered an “outage” (a.k.a. registrar renewal notice page) when it neglected to renew its domain name earlier this week.
The Wall Street Journal discusses the lapse in an article here, although the “person familiar with the matter” has the dates wrong.
The domain name expired on December 23 and has now been renewed until 2022 (not Christmas day and 2024 as the article says).
At least it appears FreshDirect is owning up to its mistake. Compare that to what backup service CrashPlan did in 2009: it blamed the domain name registrar.
In the “old days”, when a domain name expired its nameservers weren’t automatically changed to a domain registrar holding page. Although this prevented an outage upon expiration, it often meant companies weren’t aware that a domain expired until it was too late to renew. Soon, it might be mandatory for registrars to change a domain’s nameserver upon expiration.
Domainer Extraordinaire says
It’s easy to overlook/ignore renewal emails but it’s hard to ignore your website not resolving.
In the old days registrars wanted you to know your name expired. They would remove your name servers. Now because of the slimy practice of auctioning off customer’s names, they don’t want you to know.
Mike says
Hmm, the Wall Street Journal cannot talk, look at WSJDN in all tld’s and see what is missing.