Art-and-Technology: Loosing My Domain .com.au Name after 20 years...

Our website DNS renewal was strange this time. The Hosting Company, HostNetworks and DNS seller had been bought by another company a few years ago and the billing system has changed.

For the last week our site was mostly off line. An email came a couple of days ago blaming "old infrastructure".

My DNS was due for renewal, and I never received the email about it, as I did in 2024, 30 days before expiry date like the last time it renewed.

I logged onto the DNS management console and found I had the Notifications there from 25 days ago. I used the option to resend the email to myself.

Emails never came.

Strange.

I have sent emails to the support email given in the account support section.

No replies as yet.

Anyway, the account was set to auto renewal, same as in 2024, so I didn't think much about it. They were having problems and website was mostly down anyway.

Then I contacted support.

Got no reply.

I finally found a few layers down "a compliance issue" related to the DNS renewal.

I retired, left Australia 7 years ago and lost my soletrader ABN, the government issued business number.

I discovered after my DNS wasn't renewed, that without an ABN and not being resident, you can not renew a .com.au in your DNS. I did have an ABN and was resident for all but the last few years, but that doesn't, stupidly in my opinion, count. Feels like a bureaucratic punishment for not being in the taxable workforce anymore.

I wish I had known about that a year or so ago to be able to prepare. For a few years I had always been forwarding our sites email to gmail for my wife and I. I had also opened new accounts for the last years with my gmail account as the filtering and SPAM control was better.

But my wife only used the one email. All the services she made accounts on, need to be changed somehow. She does however use LINE much more than email.

Interesting times ahead.

I can just buy a new DNS.xxx and have the website back up. That doesn't help with the other service accounts that used the now unusable email address. Also will not be in Google anymore, and become unfindable with GOOGLES current advertisers first and no-click-thru strategy. For the last few years 99.9% of traffic was BOTS and AI scrappers anyway, so doing that isn't attractive. In the last 2 years, only previous customers had ever contacted me. No one new.

Previous customers will not be able to contact me anymore, unless I bulk email them of change of contact info. Not out of the question. There aren't many from the last few years anyway. But if they search for me they will probably find our blog and other sites and be able to get in touch.

I have yet to get any support from the hosting and DNS company after using their support request system. I assume the new company that bought the previously excellent hosting company has made changes that make them not excellent now.

Until this year, our website had never been down for days. And that was before the DNS expired.

No support replies and lots of down time. That crossed a line with me.

I am thinking I don't need a website any more at all. Had a huge gallery of Car Caricatures I had done, but I don't need that any more.

I searched on google if HostNetworks issues are common now:

I should just cancel it all. It appears the new owners, Edge Centres, have done what Private Equity does, even if they aren't technically Private Equity. 😡

Will say my final experience with HostNetworks Brisbane support has been very poor and do not recommend them any more.