I guess this is a cautionary tale.
I was recently having issues with my Gmail account that’s tied to my Epik ( a domain registrar ) account, so when I was supposed to renew my domain, I didn’t receive any e-mails about it. When I decided to randomly check on my website, it seemed to be down. So I checked Epik and a domain that usually cost £15 a year to renew now cost £400 to renew as it was expired.
As a teenager who does not have £400 to spend on a domain, I decided to just wait until the domain fully expired and buy it for a cheaper price.
After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did, and charged me £2,225 to renew the domain. I don’t understand how a price that large is justified, considering that my website gets barely any visitors and I basically only use the domain for hosting stuff. No idea how hiking prices this much is legal
Sorry, but chalk this up to lesson learned. It’s almost always been this way. Domain squatters will do this all the time. In fact, some domain registrars will use you searching their site for an ‘available’ domain, and if you don’t buy it up right away – will buy it and hike the price and sit on it for years in order to lock it down, knowing you wanted it.
btw, Namecheap says Sunglocto dot com is like $10 - so just register a .com. Not through that Epik piece of removed that you used before. Legit, use Namecheap; they’ve never done me wrong and have been my registrar for more than a decade now.
Time to register that domain before OP gets it…
Gohddzsx?
I prefer to be called daddy. Godaddy
Have also had good experience using namecheap for years.
Thirded for Namecheap.
I mean, I use namecheap. I’m thinking about throwing one of my domains onto cloudfare just in case.
If you don’t like namecheap, some people have been suggesting porkbun or something.
I had this happen with NameCheap. I’m not sure if they bought it or someone else, but it stayed registered with them. Whoever bought it has held it for a couple years, put up a fake website to look like they were using it, but took it down after a year when I didn’t bite on buying it. Current status shows it’s pending deletion finally for abuse or non-payment. I keep checking to see when I can nab it again.
It happens with anyone. Bots track expirations and snatch them so that they can ransom them back to you for thousands - exactly as in OPs example.
AUTO RENEW. Auto-renew. Auto-renew is the way. The solution to this problem is Auto-renew.
Yes, I just didn’t realize that auto-renew doesn’t work with PayPal on NameCheap and had lazily set it up with PayPal when I got it because I didn’t want to go get my wallet. Lesson learned!
I think you can also register 10 years in advance, or maybe more depending on the registrar, which would cover all other potential snafus like expired card info.
Namecheap is alright, but Cloudflare only charges at cost with no markup.
Then they make you use them for DNS. May or may not be a big deal, but the reason it’s at cost is to act as a loss leader to get you exposed to and buying their other products.
Yeah this is why I don’t use cloudflare, I have my domains on porkbun.
Their free services are extremely useful and you can’t find that anywhere else. I’ve used them for years with hundreds of domains and never paid them a single dime.
So search for a lot of domains at random to cost them some money?
Absolutely. But I think it might be more advanced than that. They might have some sort of analytics that measures how long people stay on the page, etc to inform their purchasing decisions.
Ah, so search a couple of domains and sit on their page for a while making random mouse movements and scrolls then? Got it.
Namecheap has extra rules if you want to use an API (minimum money spent with them, minimum of domains managed with them etc.) — GoDaddy style.
Keep that in mind, if you need an API (for DDNS or for obtaining wildcard TLS certificates) you’ll have to use a separate service for DNS.
DDNS with Namecheap is as simple as hitting a URL with a /GET request from the IP you want it to point to. No limitations. No special requirements.
I have a script running that uses the Namecheap API to automatically get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt. I didn’t pay a dime for this. Did something change?
Maybe you meet the conditions for it? It hasn’t been possible to access their API without meeting the conditions for at least a year now.
You don’t pay directly for the API, the latest conditions AFAIR are 20+ domains and $50+ on account balance and $50+ spent in the last 2 years.
They also want you to whitelist the IPs that access the DNS which makes it unusable for DynDNS, but at least they have a separate URL for that.
You really should have separate services for registration, DNS and hosting. That way you’re not held hostage by a single provider.
Why should I post someone else for DNS records if namecheap is handling it just fine for my use case?
I have my dream domain. It was being squatted for a similar amount. I offered £100 and it was declined, I offered £250 and they replied to tell me the domain is easily worth the £2K, well sort after etc. I told them that this is my surname, and I’m not a corporation with unlimited funds and they can take the offer or leave it. 15 minutes later the offer was accepted. I was so happy. Still am chuffed about it.
After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did, and charged me £2,225 to renew the domain. I don’t understand how a price that large is justified, considering that my website gets barely any visitors and I basically only use the domain for hosting stuff. No idea how hiking prices this much is legal
GoDaddy is known to do that.
Technically, they’re not hiking the price. GoDaddy
boughtscalped it after it expired and then is re-selling it at an astronomically higher price. It’s one of the many, many reasons people hate them.I’m ashamed to say I still have a couple of domains with GD that I haven’t migrated yet. This post might just light a fire under me to get that done.
Got a work related variant, a 3 letter domain we really liked was registered by a person asking a couple of hundred bucks or so. Which really was a good deal and we were more then happy to pay.
Our IT department advised guiding the transfer themselves. Instead our marketing department went ahead anyway and just agreed to “you end your subscription and after that we register it” … instead of using transfer codes.
In the minutes between, a bulk claimer snatched it away.
OMG. I can’t believe the marketing department was that inept. Tragic
Honestly I believe it. I had a VP of sales / marketing overriding requirements making them more difficult from the CEO after getting screamed at by the CEO who wanted the product (probono project) to be quick and easy for initial release.
He also ordered IT garbage for a site once (consumer PCs running Windows not server edition)
And to top it all off went behind supervisors backs in engineering departments asking for daily spreadsheets trackong their time because "if you can go to the bathroom you have time for this.
All leadership was toxic though like the CEO screaming at him lol.
LMAO they really are inept 🤦♂️
Buy a different domain. Let them pay for this one until the end of time.
Sounds like you’re in the UK, if so I’d recommend legit companies run by old nerds like Mythic Beasts: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/domains
I simply don’t get why domain squatting is legal. On my ccTLD it is absolutely illegal meaning you have to forfeit the domain if you don’t use it anymore.
Just because you don’t have a website up at [XYZ].com doesn’t mean you’re not using it. You could have a domain controller on the back end doing file services, or you could be using it for network auth, etc. Not all .coms exist for the purpose of putting up a website.
Neither do .dk domains, but in order to determine use the courts will have to be involved. I haven’t heard about a lot of those cases, but I’d guess you can prove use against the person who wants to take the domain. If I have a domain called firstnamelastname.dk it’d be pretty easy to show that I got a mail address at contact@firstnamelastname.dk that’s in use.
I own 8 domains. Only one has HTTP/S ports open. The rest are for email and other services.
Other services will be reflected by active DNS records.
If the only DNS record points to a “Buy this domain” webpage, I think it’s fair to argue that is misuse.
Doubley so if it turns out many unrelated domains are owned by and point to the same webpage, and it’s just doing a js hostname thing to make it seem relevant to the current address
Make an offer of $0.01. Assuming the responses aren’t automated, every time they reject it, raise the offer by 1c. Keep doing it till you hit the $15 mark and then just stop. It could waste literal years of their time.
Reminds me of a guy I knew who kept getting letters for a $10 parking fine he got while at university. He waited until they spent more in postage than the fine before paying it.
My last year of uni I was broke. The previous year the parking passes had red letters, that year purple. That was the only difference. The colour. I traced over all the letters of my previous parking pass with a blue sharpie and parked for free all year.
Automated numberplate recognition systems have spoilt so much fun.
Nice hacking mate.
Don’t pay this! You just reinforce their predatory practices. How renewals at much higher prices are allowed - no clue!
Something similar happened to a company I know - it expired and was immediately bought by domain squatters, when they found them they were told that it couldn’t be sold back because the squatter had paid $XXXX for and had big plans (I assume it was BS, just a premise to get paid - no site was ever put on the domain)
Solution: they bought the .org version and bought the .com back a year later.
edit:grammar
Aaahh capitalism. This is what business school graduates call “innovation” and “smart”.
But seriously, I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s predatory, abusive, and wrong.
I knew GoDaddy is somehow involved as soon as I saw the title.
I am sorry that happened to you
Thanks for sharing your story, though. I have a few domains, two of them being very important for me (one I use for all my emails, and the other one for all my self hosted stuff). So I’ll be paying close attention to their renewal
I hope you can find another domain that you like and that you can transfer your stuff to it.
That’s a horrible domain name anyways. .xyz is trash, the name itself is long, hard to pronounce and sounds like gibberish. Time for an upgrade.
That’s the second time I’ve seen someone cast xyz in a negative light. What’s wrong with it? (Genuine question, in case it needs saying)
It’s just a hallmark of “I bought the cheapest domain name TLD available”.
That’s not necessarily bad if all you need is something to get the job done, but there is a stereotype associated with it.
The Boost Mobile of gTLDs
Nothing wrong with Boost Mobile, or any other discount telecom provider either. It’s not like the phone signals taste different lmao
After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did,
Oh yeah, that’s what happens when you pick scammy domain registrars. It is very possible that Epik auctioned your domain (after wall they kept it after the expiry date and payed fees) and then GoDaddy snatched it. This is what usually happens.
Not just scammy
Epik is an American domain registrar and web hostingcompany known for providing services to alt-tech websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist materials. It has been described as a “safehaven for the extreme right” because of its willingness to provide services to far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik
I’m in no way surprised at what they did, and in fact only surprised that it wasn’t them that bought the expired domain, but instead was godaddy
