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

      • something_random_tho@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.worldEnglish
          91·
          5 months ago

          Their free services are extremely useful and you can’t find that anywhere else. I’ve used them for years with hundreds of domains and never paid them a single dime.

      • hddsx@lemmy.caEnglish
        9·
        5 months ago

        I mean, I use namecheap. I’m thinking about throwing one of my domains onto cloudfare just in case.

        If you don’t like namecheap, some people have been suggesting porkbun or something.

      • jqubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          5 months ago

          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.

          • jqubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            5 months 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!

          • Septimaeus@infosec.pubEnglish
            3·
            5 months ago

            I think you can also register 10 years in advance, or maybe more depending on the registrar, which would cover all other potential snafus like expired card info.