svembu1

Yes, that is good advice. We are reviewing all our processes about domain registries right now. Major lesson learned, and I would encourage other companies to think this through and learn from our experience today.

The domain was registered over 22 years ago, and it kept moving through registrars who were acquired. We do have a solid record of reliable services, and have kept growing in spite of never taking a dime in outside capital.

I am the CEO. Yes, this situation is unacceptable. Unfortunately domain registrars do have extreme power this way. It could happen to any domain.

Yes, all of these possibilities are under investigation. We have just recently secured ICANN approval to be a domain registrar. With our scale, this has become important now.

I agree this is unacceptable. We are figuring out ways to make this more resilient - we host third-party domain mails, and we could map those domains directly without involving our domain. That could be one solution. We have learned a serious lesson here.

This was not the company used. The domain registrar market has gone through consolidation and it ended up here. We have been moving domains and this is a cautionary tale for us.

Zoho CEO here.

Our domain was abruptly blocked by our registrar this morning. Our NOC team and myself tried to get in touch with them and they tell us "Contact our legal". Even I could not get in touch with anyone beyond their phone operator. The domain was restored, but as DNS takes time to restore, we are still facing issues. They later claimed there were abuse complaints about Zoho.com emails (which is our personal email service with millions of free and paid users). We received a total of 3 complaints from them and two of them have been acted upon and one is under investigation.

Once we dig our way out of this, we will find ways make sure no one takes down our domain again this way.