We all hear about it from time to time: some large corporation letting a precious domain name drop off the deletion cliff only to have it snagged in the “drop game” seconds after it is released. I watched, stunned, a couple years ago as oracle.net (it was not a client domain) moved through its expiry period, redemption period, then pending delete for 5 days, and then it was gone. Snagged by a domainer and is still being monetized for its traffic.
Every night we get a list of domains that are about to be deleted by the registry for non-renewal, and every night I manually inspect that list to see if anything leaps out at me as something that probably shouldn’t be deleting. We have a number of checks and balances in place to avoid this, but there isn’t anything we can do about it if our customer has let their contact info go stale and can’t get renewal notifications, or if those notifications are going into some corporate blackhole in the wake of a move or re-organization.
So last night two names lept out at me. They were the .net and the .org domains that one of our customers seemed to have let lapse. The customer is large. Trades on the Nasdaq with a multi-billion dollar market-cap large. A name most of us would recognize instantly and somebody whom I thought probably doesn’t want to let the .net and .org versions of their name slip into the abyss.
I hastily renewed the names before the registry flushed them and fired off an email to my contact there. Sure enough, they didn’t want those names to go and were relieved to have them pulled back from the edge. Now they have to take a look at what happened on their end to let something like this get past them.
Sometime ago we put together Critical Management Steps for Corporate Domain Name Assets and I think this is information we may take for granted here at easyDNS because we’re immersed in this industry, but it is a must read for corporate IT departments. Hopefully it’s old news for most of them but in some cases it seems not.
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