They lost my domain renewal somehow

Right then, mixed review time.

Hostinger lost my domain renewal somehow. Not expired, mind you. Paid in March. Receipt in my inbox. Domain shows "active" in their panel. Yet come July 15th, WHOIS says clientHold. EPP status code red as a badger's nose.

Proper panic, that was. 14 years on this domain. Email, everything, dead in the water.

Support ticket took 6 hours to get past "please verify you paid." I sent the receipt. They sent me to billing. Billing sent me to the registrar team. Three days of this.

Turns out their automated renewal pipe to the registry failed in April. Silent fail. No retry. No alert. Just... sat there.

They fixed it. Apologized. Gave me 6 months free. But cheers lads, check your WHOIS even if you paid. The panel lies.

Not work? I go to whois but not see the codes? Is there better way to monitor this? I have 4 domains with Hostinger? This is making me nervous?

Poggers cautionary tale right here

S3rver status != domain status, literally two diffrent systems

Vibe check: go to lookup.icann.org, punch in your domain, scroll to raw registry data

If you see clientHold or s3rvrHold, thats bettr than any panel

I had this with Vultr once, their renew pipe broke 2, based recovery tho

Check your domains monthly, set calendar alert, literally 5 min

Actually (and I say this with some authority (having run my own BIND servers back in my day (which was actually 2019 (not that long ago (but in hosting years that's several epochs))))), the ICANN lookup is reliable but slow.

I prefer rdap.org for JSON output. Actually wrote a parser in Python 3.7.4 (still running it (don't judge me (Debian Stable has its charms))) that checks 12 domains every 6 hours.

Back in my day (2019), I used a cron job with whois and grep. Actually found a similar lapse with RackNerd. Their panel showed "auto-renew on" but the flag never reached the registry. Caught it 11 days before expiration. Actually saved my email.

This happened to me with Contabo https://contabo.com lol. Paid for 3 year renewal, receipt said ok, 8 months later domain gone. Turns out they used some sketchy reseller chain, middle company went bust, no one told us. Now I check whois every month like a paranoid freak. You think you are safe because you paid? Nah.