common place
This happens every day I would imagine; infact it occured with ony of my clients this week. They registered their domain long before they hired my company. They had a bad experience with a freelancer previously and I guess had some caution with using a small business. I offered to host for them as well as designing and building a new website, but they went with a well known hosting company instead. The domain expired and none of my contacts in the company knew who the domain owner was. Turned out it was the in the name of one of the company director's wife. It was still in the redemption period, unlike Marketo's, and they were able to promptly renew it and everything was back on again.
I would imagine this is common place, perhaps even in big startups. They all start small, without any IT management in place, and probably everybody assumes that someone else has it sorted, and no-one double checks these sorts of things. For such a vital asset to any online business it does beggar belief that it doesn't carry more weight in terms of importance. Hopefully incidents like these give everyone a slap on the face and they can make sure they have their own houses in order.
Personally I prefer not to have auto renew on. I would rather keep track of my own domains, and then manually renew them, selecting the payment method I want to use at the time. This will usually also trigger an invoice to a client (a lot of hosting is renewed at the same time).
Anon obviously...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
