Sorry you had to go through that nuisance. Can I make one suggestion with regards to business processes? You currently appear to have domain renewals done shortly in advance of need, with manual scheduling. This is a source of risk. There are a lot of failure modes there, including "my registrar fubars the renewal", and many of them have unpleasant consequences.
Domain names are cheap and abandonment is infrequent and unlikely to save much money, for most people on HN. So renew them early, for long terms. For your business or blog or other domain which will be a going concern for the foreseeable future, go renew it for ten years. If your business gets sold to Amazon tomorrow, oh well, that cost you only $60 ~ $80 or so.
I own a small stable of domains (a few dozen) and keep most of them on rolling two year registrations, with my main ones (product sites, my blog, etc) on rolling five year registrations. I renew all of them yearly. This way, screwups by myself, my bank, Paypal, or GoDaddy probably won't deprive me of use of my property.
I agree with the gist of your point. I follow this process with some important domains because most TLDs are cheap. At ~$75-$99 per year (depending on registrar), .io is not cheap and it made no sense to cashflow at the time to throw years on it, especially as I hadn't made my mind up whether to jump to the .com I own before launch (seriously considering this now). That's my lame excuse ;-)
That aside, I'm fastidious with my calendar and delegated my responsibility by marking to renew the domain in late December prior to the expiry date. This is close to the line but still reasonably before it and this issue is something Moniker needs to clear up in its TOS or similar (Moniker even sent frequent e-mails telling me when it expired with no warning of this deactivation date.) Since I've not actually "launched" yet, I'm not baying for blood - just an improvement in their service.
If you mean, "I've learned my lesson" then yes. However, they still need to clear things up because not everyone else is going to know they do this and others probably have more important, revenue generating domains than mine ;-)
Good advice. The problem is though, with .io domains yearly prices are at about $70 (if i remember correctly). Renewing for 10 or so years is a pretty significant amount ($700+). Especially if your not sure about the potential of it or just don't have that kind of cash at hand.
Auto-renew and put two credit cards in the system, that should be enough to keep your stuff safe. Moniker is actually very good at making sure you do not lose your domains, that's their main claim to fame.
Domain names are cheap and abandonment is infrequent and unlikely to save much money, for most people on HN. So renew them early, for long terms. For your business or blog or other domain which will be a going concern for the foreseeable future, go renew it for ten years. If your business gets sold to Amazon tomorrow, oh well, that cost you only $60 ~ $80 or so.
I own a small stable of domains (a few dozen) and keep most of them on rolling two year registrations, with my main ones (product sites, my blog, etc) on rolling five year registrations. I renew all of them yearly. This way, screwups by myself, my bank, Paypal, or GoDaddy probably won't deprive me of use of my property.