Last week a hosting client of ours contacted us in regards to his site being down and wanted to know what was up with his domain name.

There were no issues or maintenance updates that had been scheduled for the server. We checked their site and had found that the domain name was no longer pointing to their website but to a site adverting the name for sale. It appeared that the name was now owned by a Chinese investment company!!!!

So we did a bit of digging into the issue and found that the domain name (the name was originally resisted with GD not us) had expired about a month or so earlier.

The reason for them loosing the name was that they changed internet providers and email addresses, so when it was time for renewal they hadn’t changed their contact information for the domain name and never received the notification  it was up for renewal and since it had been sent to the email address on file they lost the name.

Fortunately we were able to retrieve the WordPress site from the servers backups (also they had no backup of their own), register them a new domain name and get him back on the net quickly.

Lesson learned, something to keep in mind about your domain name registration if you change your email address and/or contact information make sure you change it with your domain name register!!! Registrars send out emails periodically requesting that you check and update your contact information don’t ignore this make sure your contact information IS UP TO DATE it can save you a lot of headaches in the future!!