A domain expiration at my podcast platform hit while I was recording.
ICANN has several policies in place to prevent people from accidentally letting their domain names expire. One of these is that registrars must “interrupt” the site by changing nameservers; this alerts the domain owner to the expiration during the time they can still renew the domain if they overlooked renewal emails.
While this policy doesn’t directly extend to country code operators, some ccTLD operators do something similar.
It was a bit ironic that a DNS interruption impacted me yesterday when I was in the middle of recording an interview for the Domain Name Wire Podcast.
I use Squadcast to record podcasts. Squadcast records high-quality audio on both sides of the conversation, ensuring a higher-quality audio output than using Zoom.
The company uses the domain squadcast.fm.
After finishing my interview, I received an error saying it couldn’t upload the full audio. I tried refreshing the browser to see if that would fix it, but I received a warning that the site’s connection wasn’t private.
After clicking past the warning, the domain resolved to a parking page.
Being a domain geek, I immediately went to the .fm Whois server to see what might be going on.
The Whois record (pictured above) showed that the domain expired on December 4, and the name server had changed to expired.dotfm.com. The .fm registry changes nameservers about two weeks after expiration, and this happened to occur while I was recording the show.
I immediately reached out to Squadhelp’s support, and also pinged the .fm registry to let them know. .Fm is popular in the podcasting industry, and they certainly didn’t want this domain to expire. The registry worked with Squadcast to renew the domain, and it started resolving again by yesterday evening.
It’s really unfortunate that this happened while I was recording a show. (I keep a backup local recording, so I didn’t lose the interview.) But the impact would have been far worse had the registry not interrupted the nameservers…the domain could have moved to a full deletion without the company realizing it.
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