As some of you have noticed (particularly customers trying to email me), computer-aid.com.au has been totally disabled for about one day.

Nobody hacked my site, and there was nothing wrong with my hosting company (netfirms.com).

It turns out my domain registrar (domaincentral.com.au) had decided to suspend computer-aid.com.au … apparently because it hadn’t been renewed.

Well, I check through my past emails, and I see they sent me a domain renewal notice on the 30th of April, 2009.

Mandy dutifully paid it the next day (1st May 2009)… about 3 months before it was actually due to be renewed.

We thought: ah, good, we now won’t need to worry about it expiring for a long time.

As soon as we noticed a problem, Mandy logged into domaincentral.com.au, and she could see that the computer-aid domain would expire sometime in 2011, so it wasn’t immediately clear that there was a DNS problem… but since the domain servers field would sometimes show strange names, and since my other domains (computer-aid.net.au & computeraid.net.au) worked well, then it had to be a DNS issue.

It took about an hour, but DomainCentral did find the problem “a billing problem”… yeah, right, and after a few hours for the usual DNS propagation delay, computer aid is finally back on the air.

And something similar happened a few months earlier: I registered 3 new domains with domain central… 2 were approved within an hour… but the third remained pending for about 2 weeks… only after contacting domain central, did they “fix” the problem (another “billing problem”)

But it did make me wonder: with “friends” like domain central, who need “enemies” (like website hackers)…

It also made me wonder: this problem could easily have gone on for months, if I hadn’t been paying attention.

I must say, up until about 3 months ago, domaincentral.com.au have been fantastic quality and value… but then how difficult can it be to maintain domain pointers?

Anyway, I’ll be keeping any eye on them… any more stuffups, and I’ll go elsewhere.