Reminds me of when Microsoft forgot to renew passport.com so someone just made their own payment to get it back online. They they did it again with hotmail.co.uk

Just do 10 year registrations for $100 and get it over with.

10 year registrations run out too ... with the added bonus of probably being tied to an email address that doesn't go anywhere.

someone payed for use the mail, or to hijack the domain?

Here's the famous Slashdot thread where the guy renewed passport.com.

http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/25/114201_F.shtml#90

In the first situation someone paid $35 to get passport.com renewed for microsoft (before it completely dropped). This was back in 1999 when the internet was a tad more well behaved.

Hotmail.co.uk went through a complete drop and was simply re-registered by someone before Microsoft even cared.

In neither case was the domain hijacked though. The drop cycle is nearly 60 days and the domain would be dead for at least 45 of those.

There was a time when you could volunteer to pay for anyone's domain simply by using Verisign. Even further back and anyone who could fill in a form could get a domain for free.

I've been anonymously paying for the domain name of a local charity for almost a decade. The registrar they use doesn't care who renews a domain, anyone can mail in the form with payment and a domain they control written in.

You can still pay for somebody else's domain if you talk to the right person. The web dev company I used to work for had to do it a few times.

It's humorous how the Club Penguin blog describes what happened:

"As some of you heard, Club Penguin's domain name (clubpenguin.com) had a technical glitch this weekend. The technical glitch has been fixed, but it will take some time for the site to appear as it should around the world."

Really it was a billing glitch, but a technical glitch sounds so much more forgivable.

Anyone know how much it cost ClubPenguin to get the domain name back?

Not much. Typically there is a 60 day vesting period (I am not sure if that is the correct length or name) when the domain is still in the control of the registrar and the owner can pay them a fee (it was $100 for my previous registrar) to get the domain back.

http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/gtld-lifecycle.htm

I've been involved in trying to rectify this sort of mistake before...

At least with .com.au domains, there's not a lot of risk of losing a recently expired domain, what you do suffer is a ~$100 vig for the registrar to "expedite the re-registration"...

Some companies will squeeze money out of everything when they get the chance, this reminds me of a €13 'administrative processing' surcharge I recently got on a €7.50 invoice I forgot to pay.