Lobste.rs domain renewal outage

Lobsters was down ~4 hours, until a few minutes ago, because our domain name expired. It’s now renewed. I woke up to the outage so I’m still a bit discombobulated, but here’s quick notes explaining the situation.

Our registrar had previously comped domain renewals and emails about this year’s renewal looked like it was proceeding as normal, but apparently that didn’t happen. I put our backup domain lobsters.dev up. (I registered lobsters.dev years ago because I was nervous about a country code domain with the only registrar I could find in a foreign country whose language I don’t speak.)

So I pulled up the customer control panel and could view an invoice, but the payment system was down and I was unable to pay the outstanding invoice. I emailed support and my contact there. About 15 minutes later the invoice status changed to ‘Cancelled’ (like previous years) and the domain showed as renewed to 2024. A few minutes later as DNS propagated, the domain started resolving.

I haven’t yet heard back from the registrar and will post comments below when I do. I’d appreciate any suggestions on how to better handle this potential failure mode.

Happy lobstering,

• Peter