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by WheelsAtLarge 589 days ago
This is great until you lose control of your domain because you forgot to pay it or whatever. What then? Whoever owns your domain owns your email address. It's a good solution but it's got its faults too.
5 comments

> This is great until you lose control of your domain because you forgot to pay it or whatever.

There's an easy way to address this that a lot of people overlook. Seriously, I'm not being snarky or sarcastic in what I'm about to say. A lot of people seem to really not considered this. Use a calendar.

Every major desktop OS includes calendar software, I believe, as does every major mobile OS.

Create a calendar on one of your devices and when you do something like buy a domain, but an annual recurring event named something like "renew domain" that will be due a couple weeks for the domain expires.

Get in the habit of taking a look at the calendar every day. Most also allow you to assign alerts to events to further ensure you won't miss it.

As I implied elsewhere, how does anyone manage to keep their house? I mean what if you forget to pay your mortgage?

How does anyone keep their job? What if you forget to go to/do your work?

How does anyone keep the electricity flowing/put food in the refrigerator/keep gas in the gas tank of their vehicle/maintain their internet access/etc./etc./etc.

If something is important to someone, they'll take whatever steps are necessary to keep/maintain it.

A calendar isn't a bad idea, but I assume GP has ways of making sure they do all those other things. What's different about a domain registration?

Those examples have tangible real world effects before they become permanently irreversible.
Just like domain expiration grace periods. The person you're responding to isn't wrong in that the bank will also absolutely come for your house if multiple attempts don't reach you. It may be exaggerated but registrars are happy to sell you more stuff and always (in my experience with various providers anyway) send announcements, reminders, and notices even if, granted, they won't do as much effort as a bank

People also don't seem to have trouble holding onto other things in life with recurring fees

>Those examples have tangible real world effects before they become permanently irreversible.

And losing access to your email/other domain assets doesn't have "tangible, real world effects"?

In fact, those "real world" effects is what prompted[0] this discussion of custom domains to host one's email.

Or am I missing something?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42078868

I think you missed the word “before” in their comment.

Miss a mortgage payment and the mortgage holder will try to contact you through many channels. If that fails and you keep missing payments and they decide to evict you, that process takes a while and will include even more attempts to contact you including printed notices left at your house.

Miss renewing your domain and you will probably get email from the registrar about it, but if you didn’t have the foresight to set up a filter to whitelist those it might look like spam and you might miss it. You then only find out when your domain stops working.

Also mortgage payments are typically monthly. When you have to do something monthly it is a lot easier to remember than things that are yearly, especially yearly things that aren’t associated with a holiday or other special day.

>I think you missed the word “before” in their comment.

Nope. Didn't miss that at all. What is it that the kids call it these days? "Adulting?" It really ain't that hard.

Then again, perhaps I'm some sort of superman, or maybe paying my bills on time is my super power.

Somehow I've managed to pay all my bills, keep up my house and renew multiple domains for decades. And it wasn't even hard to do. I have a whole bunch of payments I need to make that aren't simply monthly payments of equal size -- and yet I manage to do so without issue.

Do you think that's unusual or uncanny and folks shouldn't be expected to manage their financial affairs competently? Is that your point?

Then again, millions of others seem to do that just fine too. As I said previously: If it's important to you, you tend to make sure it gets done.

If you (or anyone else) is unwilling or unable to do so, then you should hire an accountant to take care of it for you. Or not.

Regardless, I take care of myself without issue. If you and/or others cannot or will not, that's a you problem.

>This is great until you lose control of your domain because you forgot to pay it or whatever. What then? Whoever owns your domain owns your email address. It's a good solution but it's got its faults too.

Yeah, this is great until you lose control of your home because you forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever. What then? The bank owns your home. So, obviously, you should never buy a home with a loan, right? A mortgage is a good solution, but its got its faults too.

Related: .NL domains will warn you if they detect you're still being sent email after the domain expired. I think they do some analysis on' who's looking up your MX records. Of course, there's also the usual grace period
Might as well buy a 10 year discounted domain registration if it's your name. You'll be using it in 10 years anyway and it will be a good investment with the discount and inflation.
Exactly. My business owns dozens of mission-critical domains. Their registration is all fully paid through the early-2030s.
even buying an IPv4 block from your RIR and using one directly in your email has the same issue