301ST
Posted on Jul 31
• Originally published at 301.sh
The domain is on auto-renew. You set it years ago and stopped thinking about it, which was the whole point. Then one morning it returns NXDOMAIN, and everything riding on it is gone at once: the site, the email on that domain, and every redirect pointed through it. Auto-renew was the one thing that was supposed to make this impossible.
It isn't, and it fails people who register domains for a living, not only the careless. The setting sits there looking healthy while the three things it quietly depends on rot out of your sight. Knowing where the net has holes — and what actually catches a domain falling through them — is the difference between finding out on a schedule and finding out from a customer.
