When I first registered lattimore.id.au in the early part of the 2000’s, I registered it via namescout who operated namescout.com.au at the time and had the best pricing for .id.au domain names by a reasonable amount. The nice thing about dealing with namescout back then was that everything was localised, as I was dealing with an Australian business.

Fast forward to 2011 and they no longer bother having a .com.au website and service everyone via namescout.com; same basic service just all via the one website. One significant change that appears to have happened with that is that they are no longer providing localised versions of their email notices, such as a domain renewal notice.

Last week I received an email stating that my domain was going to expire on 5/7/2011, fantastic. I dismissed it at the time and figured I’d deal with it next week – which sounded great until Belinda SMS’d Claire & I asking if we knew why her blog was down. After beginning to check a few things, I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong so emailed my Australian web hosting company to see if they could see anything and they let me know the domain had expired – didn’t I feel like a complete idiot.

This could have been avoided if they’d used my personal contact information to provide an domain expiry notice that provided an Australian date format of 7/5/2011, if they’d said 7 May 2011 or that somewhere in the email it said in 7 days time.

After a few hiccups getting it the domain renewed, everything eventually sorted itself out. However, it resulted in over 24 hours of website and email outage – which is frustrating.