I had my own domain for many years until the email provider of the admin email for the domain (openmailbox.org) decided to shut down. Bye bye my domain.

A good reason why no one should use an email address from their internet provider’s domain, can’t leave.

Most registrars let you prepay. I prepay mine by 5 years in advance, and have a reminder to refresh it yearly. It also is setup to auto-renew 3 months before expiration so if the charge fails… you have 3 months to fix it.

And I just finished almost three months of emergency military service and my credit card was just cancelled before due to my own mistake. Had I been two weeks into that three month window, I would have missed the renew date.

Even after the reg term expires there’s typically a grace period before the domain is unrecoverably recycled. Find a registrar with good policy, though some things are regulated by internet orgs.

Yes, thanks.

This is a nice approach.

Having too many active domains can be a pain tho

Or you decide to change the domain, but are too lazy to change the email address... everywhere, so you end up paying for 2-3 domains instead of one just for the email redirects to work.

Or you have financial troubles and no credit card just as you need to renew...

A more permanent way to buy - not rent - domain names would solve many of these issues. And changing ownership of domains should be just as difficult as changing ownership of real estate, the only people benefiting from the current ease of changing domain ownership are speculators.

There is at least one domain tld selling “lifetime” domains.

I’m not sure why icann wouldn’t let anyone pay for 10-50 years for a domain.

Domains can be decommissioned once no emails are coming across them, which can be reasonably tracked.

I had no idea or time to figure this out and luckily we weren’t the first to come across this :)

Is there a way to actually "own" your domain instead of paying registration fees every year?

You can pay ahead up to 10 years, which helps. Get in the habit of adding time every year, but you can miss up to 9 in a row before there are any problems.

This, if you can't keep a domain registration current despite the 10 year max length, domains aren't for you.

People who have been incarcerated?

Kind of an odd example in this context? Someone who is incarcerated for that length of time is liable to lose any property they fully own anyway given the kinds of monetary damages that tend to go with it. And physical property isn't trivial to have kept up for a decade away from it in jail either is it? The only way that happens is if they have it legally isolated from them and someone else who can/will be a caretaker, and in that case said person could easily renew a domain as well. If anything domains would relatively speaking seem pretty easy there, no matter what jurisdiction you're under there are domains to be had that are under a different hostile jurisdiction, there are registrars that will accept cryptocurrency payments, and costs are relatively very low. Auto-renew from a private bitcoin wallet for $10-20/yr on the face of it looks more sustainable and feasible to have work and survive court judgements following a serious felony. And during trial there is time to prep.

Nothing is perfect and the domain situation is really far from perfect, and it doesn't hurt to consider edge cases. But the Venn diagram intersection there of someone who cares enough to have custom domain that is critical, commits a serious felony, considers having the domain after release a key priority, isn't legally barred from it, and doesn't or can't take any steps towards it, seems kinda small. In that case maybe indeed "domains aren't for you" but that doesn't really take away from its use to the rest of us.

I think you would get a confluence of many of these when looking at computer crimes, because often a condition of the sentence is being unable to use a computer (and, to some extent, a lot of people who spend time on computers lack physical people in their life who can step in to help out in situations like these…)

Tell that all SSL cert holders lol

I think there’s a few rods that are free to cheap. .cx comes to mind for some reason

The system is more like leasing/renting instead of owning.

The impermanence of which isn’t the greatest.

Being able to move your domain between any email hosting provider remains valuable.

A domain that important is worth putting multiple recurring yearly calendar reminders up.

An email serving your identity is probably worth a bit more investing in.

It’s possible to leave a credit card on file to auto renew, renew for maximum years at a time, And lock down the domain enough to prevent hijacking.

This is a fair concern.

I think it could be something to start seeing instead like not paying a cell phone bill.