A year ago, the DNS for craphound.com disappeared. Which was weird, because I was paying for DNS with Dotster, my registrar.
I called them up and spoke to their tech support people. "Oh yeah," they said, "your paid service ended a month ago but our billing system was broken so we didn't send out a notice. So we terminated you for nonpayment. But dude, you're lucky! We gave you a free month's DNS!"
Lucky lucky me. I got a free month's DNS and to pay for it, I was bouncing mail all over the Internet and my Website wasn't resolving. Bastards. I bought two years' worth of DNS and vowed that when the domain came up for renewal, I'd switch away from Dotster. I sent them an email telling them as much and got an email back apologizing and saying that they would certainly never terminate my DNS wihtout notice again (you see where this is going, I trust)
Craphound.com is up for renewal at the end of August. Not wanting to leave things to the last minute, I changed over early this month, switching registrars to Domain Direct, who are now the registrar for all of my domains, and boingboing.net besides.
I didn't move over the DNS — I figured I'd paid Dotster for another year's service, I might as well get it. Instead, I left myself a reminder in my iCal for next July to set up DNS at DomainDirect a month ahead of the service running out on Dotster.
This morning, Dotster terminated my DNS. Without warning. And when I called, they told me there was nothing they could do about it. Even though there's nothing in my DNS contract that says that DNS is provided to domains registered with Dotster and no others, that is, apparently, their policy. And they can't make exceptions. Not even for 48h while I effect a graceful change to DomainDirect (who have been fantastic throughout and now have 100 percent of my domain registration and DNS business).
Bastards.
