Domain Expiration - A Reminder

Yesterday around mid-day, mikevdv.dev was down. As was mikevdv.com, vandie.co.uk and many of my other domains for this website. My logging tool (Sentry) wasn't reporting any issues and this coincided with reports of issues on Cloudflare in my area as well as with many other services including Meta (Facebook) services. As such I wrote it off as widespread technical issues with major internet infrastructure and moved on with my day. My status checker was sending me emails every 10 minutes or so telling me the site was down but I assumed that it would come back up eventually and so ignored those and continued as though it wasn't happening...

By 6pm I was starting to get concerned, the issues with other services were being reported on as minor (now resolved) issues and yet mikevdv.dev was still down. I had finished my working day and so I tried accessing it again. Only, rather than the HTTP error message I had been getting previously, A GDPR consent popup was displayed in its stead. As you might imagine, this was extreemly worrying as it meant that a different website was being returned instead of my own which could even be neferious.

I opened up cloudflare to see if there was anything in their dashboard that might indicate what was going on and saw an error indicating that they were blocking some requests (an unfortunate biproduct of having a few well performing blog posts but otherwise not a concern) as well as an error indicating that there was an TSL name mismatch error, this furthered up my concern that the app could be compromised and was being pointed elsewhere.

After checking my codebase to ensure that it was still as I expected. I went to digital ocean and triggered a redeployment manually from my github repo, making sure to access the site via IP directly. The site apeared fine when accessed via IP, but mikevdv.dev was still pointing to a completely broken GDPR consent screen.

At this point, through my mild panic, I remembered that I had recieved an email 2 weeks prior from namecheap (my domain registrar) which I had dutifully added to my read later pile. I have no idea why this emails stuck in my mind, but I decided to login to namecheap and check my domains anyway. Just to see that they were still configured correctly and that they hadn't been transfered to someone else. As soon as I do so, I see a great big notice indicating that I have 6 domains within their grace period.

Turns out my domains had expired and I hadn't noticed...

In a sense the domain had been compromised in that it was being pointed at a holding page by the registrar because I hadn't paid them their renewal fee. Long story short. This is a reminder that you should set a calander event whenever a domain is due to expire. Better yet, turn on auto renewal.