This is just a heads up if you are with Namecheap. After many years of being a satisfied customer I just lost some of my domains because the autorenew function did not work as expected. Namecheap admitted that the problem was at their end, attributing the lapse to an "unusual combination of circumstances" that led to the losses, but refused to pay for the domains to be taken out of redemption.
After searching online, I found out that this problem was first reported eight years ago and Namecheap just couldn't be bothered to fix it.
I have now transferred some of my domains out and will do the rest in the coming days. Some learnings:
1. always use a registrar who is not a re-seller. Namecheap depends on enom for registrations and I think that limits their capabilities.
2. check to see if the registrar has a phone number that you can call as well as names and accessibility to their top execs. Namecheap doesn't have either at the time of this writing.
3. since the small print is a, frankly, hard to understand and can change, assume it will change and assume also that the company will hide behind the small print, which is what Namecheap did. In other words, just manually renew the critical domains well before expiration - just to be sure
ICANN if you are listening, instead of introducing new domain types, maybe you can fix the basics. A renew date should be one date not three possible dates (30 days before, 12 days before, 7 days before and the actual renew date). As a customer, I expect to have the right to autorenew right up to 0.01secs before the actual autorenew date and time and not have some complicated set of three or four dates with redemption sub processes etc. And these rules should apply across all domain types (.com, .whatever)
After searching online, I found out that this problem was first reported eight years ago and Namecheap just couldn't be bothered to fix it.
I have now transferred some of my domains out and will do the rest in the coming days. Some learnings:
1. always use a registrar who is not a re-seller. Namecheap depends on enom for registrations and I think that limits their capabilities.
2. check to see if the registrar has a phone number that you can call as well as names and accessibility to their top execs. Namecheap doesn't have either at the time of this writing.
3. since the small print is a, frankly, hard to understand and can change, assume it will change and assume also that the company will hide behind the small print, which is what Namecheap did. In other words, just manually renew the critical domains well before expiration - just to be sure
ICANN if you are listening, instead of introducing new domain types, maybe you can fix the basics. A renew date should be one date not three possible dates (30 days before, 12 days before, 7 days before and the actual renew date). As a customer, I expect to have the right to autorenew right up to 0.01secs before the actual autorenew date and time and not have some complicated set of three or four dates with redemption sub processes etc. And these rules should apply across all domain types (.com, .whatever)
