Nominet Suspended My Account!

[HuskyPup]

Interestingly this is my 3,000th post under this nick and I wanted a good post, little did I realise it would involve all my sites being down!

For the last few hours we've been battling with trying to find out why all our sites were missing, yep, e-mail, ftp, the lot were not working however all was fine at the actual server host but pinging from all over the world generated the same results "Unknown Host".

Puzzled, you bet we were until, and don't ask me why I did this, I just decided to check the whois and it stated:

Registration status:
Registered until renewal date.
*** This registration has been SUSPENDED. ***

What?

Fortunately Nominet has a real phone service and it quickly transpired that a new database installed did not recognise my 25+ year old PO Box number therefore it immediately suspended the account even though they had a totally valid contact e-mail address not connected to the suspended account!

Within seconds it was back up and running however I am now considering changing my name servers since I find this totally unacceptable since it was their error, not mine.

Just imagine if I had been, and this does happen regularly, in China or India and had been unable to phone in? It could have been days or weeks of no service, no e-mails and no AdSense earnings.

I did nothing wrong yet was screwed-over by a program, oh nice!

[jmccormac]

Makes a change from low Adsense threads. :) But Nominet should really have tested the addressing section properly as whois data is one of the biggest problems for registries. There was a presentation about good and accurate whois data at an ICANN meeting (the Belgian one) by one of the Channel Islands registries and their software enforced accurate whois data. It is a scary thing to happen what with all the stories about domains being seized.

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

I've just been checking all my .co.uk records to ensure that all the contact details are correct etc however it is obviously very disconcerting that a 10 year old name that I use for our name servers and as an important, non business, contact e-mail address, is able to have it's information corrupted, seemingly easily, and then suspended without warning.

I do have some older .co.uk names yet their details are all correct...I wonder just why this one was targetted?

I guesstimate that I've lost between 4-6 hours of AdSense revenue etc therefore "My Earnings Are Down" does apply :-)))

I tell you this, my web hosts were in a total panic!

[bwnbwn]

HuskyPup do you do your own DNS or is it from the host?

[Demaestro]

What really scares me is that they was no effort to notify you before a slew of your sites were taken offline.

You would think there would be some sort of attempt to contact you before they hit the 'kill' switch.

[HuskyPup]

HuskyPup do you do your own DNS or is it from the host?

It's at my host but using my ns1.example.co.uk and ns2.example.co.uk

What really scares me is that they was no effort to notify you before a slew of your sites were taken offline.

I totally agree and what's more exaperating is that they have my [e-mail] e-mail address with which I first registered that .co.uk

And to cap it all I received an e-mail from them this morning thanking me for updating my address information and that suspension of the account and the domain name(s) on the account had been lifted and the services associated with my domain name(s), such as website and email, should begin working again shortly!

Ok, they were quick and switched everything back on again immediately however it is quite unbelievable that something like this can be suspended with absolutely no warning...fair do if someone is breaking the law.

But just how did this information get deleted needs to be investigated by Nominet, none of my other 20+ .co.uk names were affected.