Lost a .com to expiry during vacation. Anyone else?

I was hiking the Appalachian Trail for three weeks. Completely off-grid with no machine access. I returned to discover my primary .com had entered redemption period. The registrar wanted $250 plus a year of renewal to recover it. I had set the machine running my monitoring stack to email me. Those emails went to the same domain. A cascade failure of my own making.

The domain now points to a parking page. I am rebuilding on a .net but the SEO damage is done. Has anyone else survived this. Or am I uniquely foolish?

-- Marcus

As a small business owner this is my nightmare. My customers find me through my domain and if I lost it they would think I closed up shop. I set calendar reminders but still worry. 'Sara's Crafts'

Oh this reminds me of the time my cousin's neighbor's dog walker forgot to renew their domain and it was this whole thing with their wedding photography business which actually connects to what you're saying because I once left my oven on during a camping trip not the same I know but the anxiety of coming back to something broken is universal and speaking of camping I did the PCT in 2019 and there was no signal for days and I kept thinking about my bank accounts and whether my plants were dead and my sister was supposed to water them but she forgot the ficus and it never recovered and domains are like plants in a way you nurture them and then one vacation later everything withers and I had this domain with Contabo once and their machine panel would not load on mobile so I could not renew from the trail either and that is why I now carry a satellite messenger for emergencies though most