Stanwix Domain Renewal: Disaster and Recovery In Time for Promoting Refurbished Community Hut

Oct. 5, 2011 - PRLog -- Stanwix is a sleepy little suburb of Carlisle. Not the sort of place for high-tech nightmares you would have thought. However as the Stanwix Community Association discovered, you need to be choosy about your domain registrar.

As is the way of many well-meaning volunteers, a local who wanted to learn "the Internet" and the wonderful ways of the web, took it on himself to set up a local website that would support the local community association and also, hopefully; pay its own way. Thus was born www.Stanwix.info which carried a local blog, forum and local business directory.

The website lurched along as a fairly well ignored enthusiast’s project and because the creator had not understood the need to know his audience it never received a very high traffic level. Despite the many hours put into developing the website and pounding the streets promoting it to the local community it was a bit of a flop. In fact at one time, the creator was about to pull the plug and bin the whole project.

Recently however, it became apparent that alongside the refurbishment of the community hut and the replacement of the early years building there was a need for an online booking system to better promote use of the community facilities. Enthusiasm was rekindled just as the 60 day notice for domain renewal came in.

The domain renewal fee was duly paid to Gibsales, the online shop attached to an Internet marketing network under the name of Giblink. Having paid and being under stress from other more pressing matters domain renewal was forgotten about and assumed to have gone ahead. That was until the day the website completely vanished.

On checking the account details, the volunteer discovered that the domain and its website, http://www.stanwix.info had been deleted. Immediately, the support website was contacted: to discover that it was gone as well. Strangely there was no sign of Giblink or Gibsales either: the whole operatin seemed to have disappeared. The only sign that it had ever existed were some long outdated blog posts. The Paypal PayPal account was checked to reveal that the payment had gone to an operation under the name of Lynx Digital who had also taken the renewal payment for a second domain.  The hapless volunteer created an account with Lynx Digital and immediately got on their ticketing system to demand an explanation.

After around two months of raising tickets, to which the only response was a message saying. "Due to your lack of response your ticket has been cancelled,"  our plucky volunteer decided enough was enough and rang the advertised phone number, only to discover that there was nobody there either!  He'd been had!

After toying with the idea of contacting the police in California where they were located,  other matters were far more pressing and it was never followed up. Until that is, http://www.stanwix.info suddenly reappeared as an AdSense website. To say that the original owner was annoyed was an understatement, but worse than that was the feeling that he had been robbed.

Even though this voluntary, hobby domain had fallen into the hands of some avid domainer, there was an opportunity for some sort of redress. Quickly checking the Whois information for the domain revealed the usual...  lack of information!  It had been anonymised and only gave the generic contact information of the registrar’s "Whois Privacy Protection" e-mail address. It didn't seem likely that an attempt to complain would have much success, but an e-mail was composed; explaining the situation,  dissatisfaction with Giblink and Lynx Digital and the complainants desire to regain control of the domain.

Weeks went by and interest was lost in the whole affair. Until several weeks later, an e-mail arrived in the inbox, mostly in Spanish and which seem to say. "You want your domain back pal?"  The response was. " Yes!"  To cut a long story short, despite many technical challenges,  control of the domain was eventually regained, approximately 4 months after http://www.stanwix.info had vanished. It cost four times the renewal fee the helpful volunteer had already paid. Disaster recovery was complete, but embarrassingly painful.

It would seem that despite the Whois identity protection scheme, it is still possible to persuade most registrars to contact the domain's owner. And while the subject of the story feels hard done by at the extra cost incurred, he was at least able to get his association's website back up and running. It would therefore seem to be good advice to make sure that when you buy a domain for your next website, you make sure that the registrar is ICANN accredited.

There will be many others outside the realm of the switched on, high-tech Internet elite who run into problems such as those described above. I hope that this little tale of domain disaster followed by disaster recovery as happened to the Stanwix.info website will serve as a little warning to newcomers in the domain registration field to take a little extra care in their choice of registrar.

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Stanwix Community Association manages the site of the playgroup building and newly refurbished Community Association building. The early years building is purely for education, the community hut is available for hire by individuals, groups and businesses.