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
Sorry, but chalk this up to lesson learned. It’s almost always been this way. Domain squatters will do this all the time. In fact, some domain registrars will use you searching their site for an ‘available’ domain, and if you don’t buy it up right away – will buy it and hike the price and sit on it for years in order to lock it down, knowing you wanted it.
btw, Namecheap says Sunglocto dot com is like $10 - so just register a .com. Not through that Epik piece of shit that you used before. Legit, use Namecheap; they’ve never done me wrong and have been my registrar for more than a decade now.
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.
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.
Namecheap is alright, but Cloudflare only charges at cost with no markup.
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.
Namecheap has extra rules if you want to use an API (minimum money spent with them, minimum of domains managed with them etc.) — GoDaddy style.
Keep that in mind, if you need an API (for DDNS or for obtaining wildcard TLS certificates) you’ll have to use a separate service for DNS.
You really should have separate services for registration, DNS and hosting. That way you’re not held hostage by a single provider.
I have a script running that uses the Namecheap API to automatically get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt. I didn’t pay a dime for this. Did something change?
Maybe you meet the conditions for it? It hasn’t been possible to access their API without meeting the conditions for at least a year now.
You don’t pay directly for the API, the latest conditions AFAIR are 20+ domains and $50+ on account balance and $50+ spent in the last 2 years.
They also want you to whitelist the IPs that access the DNS which makes it unusable for DynDNS, but at least they have a separate URL for that.
Absolutely. But I think it might be more advanced than that. They might have some sort of analytics that measures how long people stay on the page, etc to inform their purchasing decisions.
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
GoDaddy is known to do that.
Technically, they’re not hiking the price. GoDaddy bought scalped it after it expired and then is re-selling it at an astronomically higher price. It’s one of the many, many reasons people hate them.
I’m ashamed to say I still have a couple of domains with GD that I haven’t migrated yet. This post might just light a fire under me to get that done.
Got a work related variant, a 3 letter domain we really liked was registered by a person asking a couple of hundred bucks or so. Which really was a good deal and we were more then happy to pay.
Our IT department advised guiding the transfer themselves. Instead our marketing department went ahead anyway and just agreed to “you end your subscription and after that we register it” … instead of using transfer codes.
In the minutes between, a bulk claimer snatched it away.
Honestly I believe it. I had a VP of sales / marketing overriding requirements making them more difficult from the CEO after getting screamed at by the CEO who wanted the product (bono project) to be quick and easy for initial release.
He also ordered IT garbage for a site once (consumer PCs running Windows not server edition)
And to top it all off went behind supervisors backs in engineering departments asking for daily spreadsheets trackong their time because "if you can go to the bathroom you have time for this.
All leadership was toxic though like the CEO screaming at him lol.
Hahaha. I purposely got a jibberish .xyz domain. If they ever ask for more than the $9.99 a year they can pound sand.
They don’t really care. They’re fishing for “whales”. Those who forgot to renew their domain or something but desperately need it back. Businesses, likely.
I’ve lost my domain too. It took me two years to get it back. Hopefully it won’t be squatted for long
