[ryanbrunner]

I actually had this happen to me. My credit card was compromised, the domain (which was registered 10 years ago) was tied to an old e-mail I never use, so I never got payment failure alerts, and didn't notice it was expired until a few days after I stopped receiving e-mails and the domain had been bought by someone else.

It's a huge pain to deal with, since it's 100% unrecoverable since there's no one to really appeal to and you're just forced to update your e-mail everywhere.

[arp242]

Many (though not all) TLDs employ a "grace period", where the domain stops working but you have some time (usually 30 days) to renew it before it's really de-registered. This is to prevent exactly these types of scenarios.

[ziml77]

I had a similar issue where I didn't get the renewal failure emails. Fortunately no one else grabbed the domain, but there was a window of a week where someone could have! I still use my own domain for my email, but I can't help but feel like maybe it's not the best idea.