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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I got my own domain and moved off gmail because of this, but I can’t afford the time to help support everybody else doing that. (I do encourage them to at least move to a paid provider, though.)

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While rare, there have been cases of people losing their paid-for domains too - because a company wanted them and had a lawyer convince the registrar that it should really be theirs (obviously exaggerating), or because the registrar made an error and accidentally put it back on the market etc.

These cases are super rare though, Google users getting rekt are much more frequent, that's for sure!

People forgetting to renew happens frequently too. Now what's more rare, Google banning someone for no reason or a person forgetting to renew and losing its domain?

Also forgetting to setup 2FA with the registrar, forgetting to setup whois privacy on the domain, forgetting to turn on transfer locks. Domains with their short term leases and meant-to-be-easy transfers between/among too many lowest common denominator, cost cutting providers and a technical standard/backend ripe for easy accidental dox leaks are an interesting case of almost built to cause social engineering attacks, in too many different ways.

Not that any of the alternatives to DNS have yet proven to be half as reliable, but it's still fascinating how DNS is both simultaneously our best and worst hope for identity "ownership" on the current internet.

If you care, pay for 10 years in advance, and still extend every year to keep the 10 year rolling window.

I think there's a significant base rate difference.

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