My register lost johnliu.net domain and didn't even tell me

I don’t know if I had blogged this before, anyway, I’ve owned johnliu.net for a couple of years.  In 2006, It expired into redemption period (because I’ve changed email and didn’t follow my old email address, my bad).  But I was able to save it in time.

In 2007, it again expired, but this time I received no email notification from the domain register.

They were not able to re-secure my domain, so now it’s parked by some evil domain squatter.

The register gave me john-liu.net for free.  But it sucks when you can’t trust your register to remind you that your domain is expiring.  (The same register seem to send me a lot of spam mail promoting their SEO technology).

I think this year, I’m going to go for an external host and have john-liu.net redirected there.  I’ll probably keep using spaces for blogging.

Update on 2009-05-19 13:52 by JohnLiu.NET

Hey didn’t you lose your johnliu.net - how did you get it back?

The trick is to not advertise your website.

You see, when I had johnliu.net I tried hosting my own blog, CMS, Wiki…  but the server I used at home was a bit on the crap side and I always suspected that script kiddies are out there hacking my machine at home.

At the end, I just leave that machine off for long stretches of time.  All requests to that server automatically fails.

I still held the domain, but it never lead to anywhere.  
It even fell off google.  (this actually was a bigger lost I feel at the time)

So because no one was really visiting the site, when the squatters got it - they didn’t keep it after the intial (I assume ‘free’ period).  They let it expire, and my register was able to lock it and hold it for me.

In summary, I got lucky.

Now that I’m more serious about the domain again - I better not let it expire like last time.