Thursday, May 9, 2013

Information on the last outage

You may have noticed that safe.mn (not go2.gs, clic.gs, cliks.fr or 888.hn) expired recently, and was not functioning for a couple of days. This was not an error from our side. Here are all the details.

We registered the main domain safe.mn in 2009. There were very few registrars for .MN at that time, and even fewer affordable registrars in the US. We settled for Planet Online.

All went fine until 2012. In 2012, we had troubles to renew the domain. We paid Planet Online, but they did not renew the domain. It took many phone calls over a couple of weeks to get the problem resolved on their side. Of course, we wanted to switch provider. But transferring out the domain did not work (and other parts of their panels were broken as well). Then, we wanted to renew the domains for 10 years. Unfortunately, only 1-year renewal were authorized. Finally, we set up a long TTL (1 week) on the DNS records in anticipation of new issues. It look like it did not help in the end.

In March 2013, we paid for the renewal 2 months before the expiration date. Again, the payment was successful, but the renewal was not done. We sent many e-mails and phone calls, but no reply. Finally, we learned that planet Online was out of business.

We still had 2 to 3 weeks to figure out what to do. Most of the TLDs managed by Planet Online were transferred to Namesbeyond ... except .MN! We contacted nic.mn and other registrars, none of them could help. Finally, we were pointed out to the right people at the right registrar. It took another few days to prove that we were the legitimate owner of safe.mn, and for the registrar to check that Planet Online was indeed unreachable.

Finally, 4-5 days after the domain expired, and redirected to a different page, safe.mn as renewed and transferred to a new registrar. We are still in the process of verifying whether we should stay with the current registrar, or go to a new one. We'd like to register the domain for 10 years.

Sorry for the 4 to 5 days of interrupted service. Be assured that safe.mn is still alive, we want to keep it around forever.