domains are an asset just like anything else. personally i don't see why if you are a business, you don't register you domain for 10 years or more. just as a test i went to godaddy and looked at how much it costs to register a .com domain for 10 years... it was less than $100. honestly... if you are a business and it costs you $1000 to register you domain for 100 years, why wouldn't you do it.
Second, long-term renewals are precisely the scariest ones. It's actually tremendously difficult for a business to keep a process in place that happens once every 10 years. The employee who registered the domain (and their e-mail address) are probably long gone. The responsibility has been passed along 5 different employees during that time, and the last one got fired and nobody knew they were the one in charge of renewals. And then you find out, suddenly you don't own the domain anymore!
This is the whole problem in a nutshell. Counter-intuitively, if it were a bill sent monthly, it would be much harder for people to forget about (and you could rely on USPS forwarding for changes of address).
They offer 20 and 100 year "registration". I put registration in quotes because the max underlying registration is still only 10 years. They implement 20 and 100 year registration by registering for 10 years and then extending that one year per year.
The 100 year "registration" used to even be a good deal. It was $999, which for .com and .net and .org brought the effective per year price down to around what the cheaper registrars charged and locked it in.
I actually thought of using it for my domain, until I remembered that I'll be long dead before getting anywhere near even half of that time out of it. Even taking into account likely price increases in year by year registration at the cheap places, which make the break even point for $999/100 years much earlier than 100 years, I was unlikely to be around that long.
100 years is now $2000, making it a much less interesting deal. Still, assuming a modest annual increase at the cheap registrars it still does eventually win so if you are going to need the domain a long time it might actually be worth it (if you are confident NS will last that long), and does make it so you don't have to think about the problem for another 100 years.
The 20 year option, also for $20/year, is almost certainly not worth it unless not having to worry about renewal for 20 years is an overwhelming concern for you. The prices at the cheaper registrars are probably unlikely to rise fast enough to make the break even for $20/year less that 20 years out, assuming you start with a 10 year registration now so that the current ~$10/year is locked in for 10 years.
I know it's not the main point of your comment, but if you're going to consider future annual increases you should also consider the net present value. If you have to pay $2000 up front and the cost of a domain stays at about ~$10/year but goes up with inflation, you'll never win. Financially, you're better off investing your $2,000 (even very conservatively) and then paying the $10/year registration fee out of your earnings while pocketing the rest (and still having your $2,000 in principal at the end).
Yeah, but then you're dealing with Network Solutions for 100 years. That's not a good deal at any price. :P
Also for a fairly small organization you can have all the domains listed in one place with the renewal dates and review that every 6 months or year (to make sure all the new ones were added, the contacts are still all valid [hopefully you setup things like [domains]@[companyname].com or something but..., you have noted any that you no longer want or were transferred away...
That's also a good idea because it gives you plenty of time to switch domains if you have to.
Consider the recent almost-sale of .org which had a lot of people worried about large price increases. If you want to move to a cheaper TLD after such a thing it could take a lot longer than a year. Remember, it's not just web stuff you need to address. There's also email. My primary email has been at my personal domain for over 20 years--getting everyone who has it updated with a new address at a different TLD would not be quick.
By keeping it 10 years out, I've got at least 9 years to deal with moving everything if I have to switch.
Credit cards expire, e-mails get deactivated, addresses change.
If you're not getting notices about your domain expiring in the first place, auto-renew isn't going to stay working after your credit card expires, which is only a couple years.
The key point is that a human needs to be involved in an audit process which occurs regularly. And so I renew all my domains once per year in December, a year in advance.
Now that I think about it, I suppose I could extend one year at a time, but keep a 1-2 year buffer (or larger) in case of dire emergency instead of a 0-1 year buffer.
That still runs into the 10 year problem. Whatever payment information an organization sets up will probably be invalid in 10 years.
The expiration date is public information, so even if the person left and you have no idea which email is registered on it - you still own the business (and thus can reclaim the account) and can check publically whether the renewal is due.
Just try to remember what you bought 10 years ago, and you'll understand why I'm scared of long-term renewals.
Renew for 10 years and then have a process to extend the renewal every year.
there are so many calendar and reminder apps out there. just setup two of them to go off to remind you. respectfully, your forgetfulness is not an excuse.
Your point about business operations is totally valid, but business is just one sort of human activity and shouldn't be the yardstick for everything else. Most of these blogs on blogspot.in were likely just personal journals. Domain registration seems like the sort of thing a public blockchain would be ideal for in comparison to a centralized registrar.
I'm in the minority of people when I say this, but I'm in favor of making domain ownership enough of a burden to reduce the number of domains registered and never used vs. making them extremely cheap and easy to own.
There are so many great domains that are registered and not in use. When starting a company these days, it's difficult to find a decent .com without paying thousands of dollars to a squatter or compromising with a TLD like .io
Why? Professional domain squatters are the ones that never forget to renew, because it's their main business. And if they stop paying on 1,000's or 100,000's of domains, the registrar will take them to court pretty quick to resolve the contractual debt. And either the company goes bankrupt or pays the bill, same as literally any other professional service. A contract's still a contract.
And if you're squatting on just a few domains personally and stop paying, it goes to collections, shows up on your credit report, and lowers your credit score like any other consumer debt not meeting payments. Which, if you want to open new credit cards or buy a house, is gonna be a big problem.
There are already avenues to address this, the same as any other debt you incur. "Forever" just means until it sends you to bankruptcy and you lose it formally, worst-case scenario. It's not some kind of blank check to register a billion domain names, not pay for them, and face zero consequences...
I assure you all countries have collection agencies even if its 3 guys with ak's in a technical with a DhskA
I'm very unhappy with the impermanence of online resources; some great websites that I used to rely on for information or conversation have just disappeared with time. Some have been archived by the Wayback Machine, some haven't. Obviously, a permanent server is a bigger concern (and a bigger problem) than a permanent domain, but I still think something like this could be a step in the right direction.
Maintaining ownership of a trademark is not trivial. People pay lawyers to do it. Perhaps they should do the same for important domain names?
https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-maintaining-trademark-regis...
If a business screws up, paying a few grand in late fees is much better than losing it to a squatter and that can protect users from someone malicious buying a domain used by an app or something.
But even that should be capped to some reasonable time scale, like 90 to 120 days.
That was a fun day. Lots of freaking out, lots of looking balefully at all of our branded swag (domain printed as part of logo).
It turned out alright in the end - we got the domain back by placing a call to the TLD organization.
It's still pretty ridiculous, because businesses have plenty of other periodic filings and fees and renewals to deal with that have nothing to do with computers. There are permits that need renewal. Old fire extinguishers need to be replaced or recharged to avoid fines when the fire inspectors come around. There are all kinds of tax filings due monthly, quarterly, and yearly. There are various trademark and patent maintenance fees they need to pay during the life of a trademark or patent to keep it alive. They might also have long term contracts with janitorial services, landscaping services, copier/fax maintenance services, utilities, payment processors, and many others that they might want to review a couple weeks or months before they expire to research if they want to change providers.
Somewhere they should have a shared unified calendar of all these things, listing when they are due and what manager in in charge of getting them done. The computer stuff, like domain renewals and certificate renewals, should be on there.
This calendar should be regularly checked by someone high up, like the COO. That person just has to check it enough to be aware of any deadlines approaching, and if they do not get marked as "in progress" as they get close this person can poke the head of the appropriate department to get it taken care of.
Sure, a department could still have forgotten in the way you describe, but it gets noticed before the deadline giving them time to figure out how to fix it. But unless you get a chaotic shake up at the top, it should be nearly impossible for a company to actually forget about any of the aforementioned deadlines.
Even failing to renew a corporate franchise with a state "only" has the consequence of that corporate entity being administratively dissolved. While likely catastrophic for that specific corporation, if "Example Widgets Ltd." fails to be renewed, I can't come along and register "Example Widgets Ltd." on the corporate register and then ring up the bank of the former Example Widgets and say "hi there it's me Example Widgets please hand over checking account."
All of that said, I don't know if there's a better way to handle this. If we assume that domain names must expire--which we currently do, and I can make an argument for and against that assumption--then what's next? It's expired but never usable again?
Good thought experiment for the morning to take my mind off of COVID's impacts on transit funding.
(Nobody is going to give up their $5/year just because it's hard to get people to renew the domain. As losing blogspot.in showed, someone was willing to pay when Google couldn't be reached to give them a working credit card.)
Far better would be that a domain is yours in perpetuity until you explicitly cancel it. If you don't pay, you get bills, or it goes to collections, or the domain temporarily stops resolving or something... but you shouldn't lose it. (If a person passes away, their estate figures out what to do with it.)
The notion that if you forget to pay, 60 days later it's gone (poof), just seems like a dumb policy in the first place.
And for those wondering how a business forgets to renew, it's pretty easy: the employee (A) in charge of managing renewals is let go, and so is their manager (B) at around the same time, so the manager (B) doesn't transfer responsibility from (A) to a new person, and their manager (C) doesn't realize the original employee two levels down (A) never had their responsibility transferred, because that was B's job.