Pick your domain registrar carefully

Something that has been playing on my mind for about a month is how vulnerable a business is to complete collapse. Maybe I’m over exaggerating but today that theoretical ‘what-if’ scenario came true: My domain ‘registrar’ (read: actually the Nic.IO) decided to stop serving most requests for .IO domains.

I own both fine.io & fry.io. A good portion of my mail is hosted on the first domain and the second serves roughly 200,000 visitors a month at some points. But now both are down and there is not a thing I can do about it.

Every sale I could’ve made today. Every email I could’ve sent. Every potential customer I could’ve convinced. We go through such rigorous routines to make sure sites can handle surges in traffic or someone gaining access to the database and yet the thought that one of the most important gateways to all of the above could just crash one day never occurred to me.