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Forgot to pay my domain for a year and now I have to spend £2200 ($3000) if I want to get it back (lemmy.zip)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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

`PREMIUM DOMAIN`
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[–] 36 points 2 years ago (11 children)

Have also had good experience using namecheap for years.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Thirded for Namecheap.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    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!

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Namecheap is alright, but Cloudflare only charges at cost with no markup.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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