Forgetting to pay about thirty bucks leads to critical services going down.
For about 24 hours in September, two IBM services associated with IBM Bluemix went down. The cause? Expired domain names.
According to an incident report spotted by The Register, global-datacenter.com and global-datacenter.net expired, bringing down Reverse DNS and Global Load Balancing with them. Ouch.
The company says the domain names are now set to auto renew to prevent this from happening again. I think the company would be wise to renew the domains for ten years at a time. It only renewed them for two years.
Perhaps executives at FedEx should take note: the Fedex.com expires next month.
Great observation i.e. “why don’t folks just remember to auto-renew?” On the other hand why don’t all of us simply remember to do everything that’s important? The point is, human beings shouldn’t be expected to remember anything. That’s why we have processes and systems to cover for us frail humans. The fact of the matter (in this example of corporate domains) is that few large enterprises can point to any sort of internal automated process for managing domains. Email reminders, compliance by spreadsheet and “don’t forget to auto renew” verbal policies don’t add up to a reliable process for something so mission-critical.
If your service relies on a domain name to work, maximise the registration period.
Ensure you have a reminder in place to renew every year thereafter