Counterpoint: I lost a domain when a registrar went out of business, and another when a registrar bumped the price 10x and refused to give me authenticode unless I physically show up to their office. Sure, I cheapened out and used shady cheap registrars, and this all happened a while ago so things are probably more regulated now, but for comparison I never permanently lost access to hosted email. (Losing access temporarily is another thing, Google likes blocking me from my own account when travelling.)
For people reading this that are worried, .com and .net domains are price capped and while the price may rise, it's regulated directly by the ICANN. If you're paying more than that then either your registrar is not following ICANN regulations or you're buying a domain that is being resold by a third party.
Awesome. I should have clarified that they were regional TLDs.
One time I had several domains at a registrar that began to fall apart organizationally. They couldn't transfer my domains out with their automated tools and they weren't answering my emails. I filed a dispute with ICANN and had all my domains transferred out within a week.
So at least for .com and .net there's a responsive third party with procedures to work around failing registrars.
Same thing happened to me over 20 years ago back then it was common to get domain hosting email all from one provider. They hiked up the price to something extortionate and changed the owner details on the domain to themselves cost me a fair penny to get that back from then on I kept my domain email and hosting all separate and stuck with what are hopefully more reputable providers. And of course these days if it happened I'd go straight to legal action something that young me didn't think of.
Even if you don't do dealings with shady registrars or TLDs (.af was a fun TLD until the Taliban returned to power...), you can lose your domain. For instance, lots of British people lost their .eu domains when they were no longer EU citizens thanks to Brexit.
On the one hand, using national TLDs can be a problem if the area you live in is no longer considered part of your country (I imagine .ua owners may have that problem in the future with the way things are going). On the other hand, using TLDs like .com/.net/.ai/.io puts your domain under control of foreign law enforcement (US for .com/.net, UK for .ai/.io).
It really ought to be standard that people who already have domains when something like this happens retain them.
It looks like .io will change jurisdiction. Another thing to consider with regards to jurisdictions. There is a good argument for you own national TLD.
That said, a lot of ccTLDs are not that restrictive. Anyone can register a .uk for example (so, Scottish nationalists have one less thing to deal with in their plans).
In the case of Ukraine they will probably want to allow people in any territory they lost to retain .ua domains as a way of maintaining a claim (that is assuming their rules are restrictive in the first place).
This is why you (1) keep a local backup and (2) never ever use shady registrars for anything important. Hopefully you have learned from this and you regularly backup your email from Google in case your account becomes inaccessible for whatever reason.
I think the main worry about losing access to email is not losing access to your historical archive of email messages, but rather your sudden inability to reset passwords and recover access to other accounts.
Not to mention the risk that someone else takes possession of said email accounts and domains, in which case they essentially own every account you have that's bound to that email.
The archives can be quite important, I frequently have to reference my email history for one reason or another. If I temporarily cannot receive new email, it’s not such a big deal as long as we aren’t talking about hostile account takeovers. But mostly I use self-hosted services so even that wouldn’t be the end of the world. It would be annoying to deal with, yes.
I lost mine when a TLD (.xyz) thought I was malicious. I've also just failed to renew a domain before. So you're relying on the registry operator for the TLD itself to not ban you, the registrar to successfully renew, and yourself and your bank to successfully lay the registrar.
In fact the entire reason I stay on free email from a company I don't like is because I think it minimizes the chance I lose access to my email. My conclusion is essentially the exact opposite of the article.
You can purchase domains for 10 years. If you buy another year each year then you have 9 years to work out a bank issue.
A registrar banning you doesn’t remove your ownership of the domain. File a complaint with ICANN and you will get it back shortly.
I'm surprised to read they had an actual physical office you _could_ show up :)
was it a very distant location to head out to?
It was some address in Warsaw, so if I needed that domain badly, it'd be one Ryanair flight away, and definitely an interesting experience :) But I was only using it for a small blog, so I just let it expire. I hoped I would be able to register it again immediately after it expires, but some scammers beat me to it (probably scanning for expiring domains with good reputation/SEO), so last time I checked, the domain is used to advertise some magic pills.
Now I am curious. Was that registrar "nazwa.pl"?
While I did lose access to a hosted email and other services, and only permanently lost access to a free domain name so far, also was close to losing access to regular paid domains on multiple occasions (once because of the used registrar, twice because of the place I live in and international politics, being disconnected from payment systems, though with registrars also contributing a little).
Mandatory reliance of services on other services (whether it is email, phone, or a more explicit identity provider) is generally unfortunate. I think it is best to not look for a perfectly reliable setup, as it is unachievable, but to keep in mind that they are not reliable, to have recovery plans and fallback options if possible, reduce dependence on online services, especially those depending on others. Though a personal domain name still seems more reliable to me than that of an email provider.
Cloudflare aren’t a bad registrar (imo) - they sell and renew domains at wholesale cost, forward emails, can do website landing pages with a Worker (etc). Understand the product in depth and would seem like a reasonably safe bet. (Not shilling for them, just personal experience).
Cloudflare does not allow you to use other nameservers. That makes them a bad registrar since they forbid using a different service for a unrelated thing.
A lot of s&p's use Markmonitor (brokies need not apply)