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advice When The Registrar Dies and You Can't Renew Your Domain Before The Expiry Date

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CarpeDiem

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Here's the situation...

Several years ago, I acquired a domain name separate from my main registrar. It was a small registrar, not very well known, but annual renewals were not a problem. I didn't have immediate plans for the domain, so I just renewed it once a year, and forgot about it the rest of the year.

I could have transferred it to my main registrar, but never did.

Now I try to renew the domain, and the credit card isn't accepted. (It is accepted everywhere else. There is no credit card issue.)

I contact the registrar's support, but there is no response. I Google the registrar and find out others have recently had the same no-response problem.

Fortunately, I can still login to the registrar, and find the domain control panel is still working. Great.

So I get the auth code to transfer to my main registrar, but the main registrar doesn't accept the transfer, because I never received the confirmation email.

I look up the email address for my domain in the whois record. The domain has an anti-spam privacy setting; the registrar uses a separate domain name for the spam-blocking email address. I find out that domain name has expired.

I contact the registrar and ask them to renew that whois privacy email address, but there is no response.

To make the situation even more complicated, there is that new 60-day domain lock rule, so I doubt I can even complete the transfer in time even if I can change the whois record (removing whois privacy) to my current email address. The domain expires in January.

It looks as if I can't transfer the domain nor renew it.

Any advice?

What do you do when the registrar fails?
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Interesting issue - and hope you get it sorted!

trying to directly contact ICANN or NIC/registry?
 
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I filed a complaint with ICANN (official complaint form), but no reply yet. Their page confirmed it was sent, but there was no receipt confirmation by email (with a ticket number or anything like that).
 
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