Goodbye .mu - domain change

Jean-Marc -

Not that I have many followers or that this blog is known; which in this case is actually a good thing, cause else they will all have noticed a major downtime and unavailability without knowing and understanding what's going on.

Here's what happened... I had the clement.mu domain for few years now (more than 5 if am not mistaken) and though the prices have been increasing ($100/year for a .mu), I've always kept it and ensured it's renewal.

What you also need to know is that apart from very high prices, the .mu domain is one with a lot of conditions and constraints regarding payment, renewal and such:

  • domain have to be renewed 2 days before expiry
  • d-2 and domain is already set inactive and has to be restored
  • extremely high restoration fee (~$2000) - no late renewal
  • failure to renew and pass the restoration period (14 days), domain is still blocked (from what i've read as haven't reach this stage yet)

So 3 days before expiry, I make the payment which goes in and my registrar (Gandi.net) set the status of the order as "in progress". Paypal confirms payment went through and everything should be good.

The next day I see my order status still at pending and on trying to get the details, I get an error. In the afternoon, domain is not active anymore and already moved to restorable. Within couple of hours and my domain is not working anymore, email bouncing back and site/blog unavailable.

Opening a case with support doesn't help, and as at now 3 days later, they have yet to reply.

So I was at first so mad and wanted them to work it out but then after reading online that others had basically the same issue with .mu domain (seems that's a usual practice), I thought hey let's just change and stop throwing money to people that are just taking advantage of the system.

So here it is goodbye .mu domain, won't ever buy another one as well.

Unfortunately for me though clement is quite a common name and was difficult to find another domain avaible. .io, .com and basically all the usual ones were taken. Manage to stumble on the .cloud and get it... so as from now on, that's my new home.