Foursquare.com the popular app for letting people know where you are domain name expired yesterday briefly sending some visitors to a GoDaddy.com landing page. The domain name was quickly renewed but this easily could have been prevented by simply renewing the domain name in time.
Foursquare actually recently purchased the domain name Foursquare.com and took control of the domain on 9-4-2009. I had written about the purchase shortly after Foursquare.com was purchased with some venture capital money.
Although the domain name was only purchased 6 months ago and domain name registrations are normally good for a year, since the domain name was purchased from a previous owner, it just so happened that the domain name was registered out to 3-25-2010 by the past owner and when Foursquare made the purchase, did not extend out the expiration date of the domain name.
Whois history records for Foursquare.com show this is the case:
GoDaddy.com and most major domain name registrars have a feature called Auto Renew in place to prevent unwanted domain name expiry dates to be reached but first it has to be turned on to work. Auto Renew at GoDaddy is a default turned on. If the credit card on file is expired or simply no credit card is on file, would also prevent a domain name from auto renewing.
Several email notification about the soon to expire domain were sent but it is likely that these emails were ignored or simply went to a spam folder. I have also heard of ghost records being a problem from time to time, so the past domain name owner may have been getting the email notifications. I did check via whois history and the email address on file did change a couple of times, so this could also have been a problem.
If you happen to purchase a previously owned domain name, it is always best at time of purchase to extend out the registration so you do not forget. You can extend out registration up to 10 years! So why were Foursquare.com users seeing a GoDaddy landing page? Most domain name registrars change the DNS (domain name servers) when a domain name reaches its expired date.
I didn’t think GoDaddy changed DNS the day of expiry but they clearly must. If you are wondering the process GoDaddy uses with expired domain names, I wrote a pretty lengthy and detailed explanation to what happens during the process. If an expired domain name is not renewed, 25 days after reaching expired date, the domain name goes to auction to be sold.
Valentin
You have to pay the price for auto renew. With auto renew you don’t have the chance to enter some coupon code to get a discount. Pretty ugly if you have a domain with GoDaddys private registration.