Reglikedomain industry desk

FreshDirect.com latest firm to go down thanks to expired domain

Firm forgot to renew its domain name, which expired December 23.

Add FreshDirect.com to a long list of firms that suffered downtime thanks to not renewing their domain names.

The firm suffered an “outage” (a.k.a. registrar renewal notice page) when it neglected to renew its domain name a few days back.

The Wall Street Journal discusses the lapse in an article here, although the “person familiar with the matter” has the dates wrong.

The domain name expired on December 23 and has now been renewed until 2022 (not Christmas day and 2024 as the article states).

At least it appears FreshDirect is owning up to its mistake. Compare that to what backup service CrashPlan did in 2009: it blamed the domain name registrar.

In the “old days”, when a domain name expired its nameservers weren’t automatically changed to a domain registrar holding page. Although this prevented an outage upon expiration, it often meant firms weren’t aware that a domain expired until it was too late to renew. Soon, it might be mandatory for registrars to change a domain’s nameserver upon expiration.

Also on the wire

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