Cyberium saves Kate's concert tour

31st Jul 2012

What happens if a domain which you use, but which is not owned by you, is not renewed because the owner has died, and your website and e-mail go down?

Cyberium's client, Kate Doubleday, had a disaster last week when her website and e-mail went down on the eve of a major concert tour.

We found out that her domain, katedoubleday.com, had been registered by a previous consultant, who had neglected to renew it. After some detective work we discovered this was because he had died in 2010!

The registrar refused to release the domain. Hastily, we registered a new domain, katedoubleday.co.uk, arranged new server space, and shifted the database, e-commerce, website and e-mail over to it.

She was able to alert her promoter and all of her e-mail list contacts to the new website and e-mail within two days to minimise the damage.

Four days later, the domain registrar was persuaded to disregard the normal 20 days grace period for domains that have not been renewed, seeing the special circumstances, and after being assured of the correct identity of the new registrant, who was clearly the rightful owner of the domain, and the .com domain was assigned to her and the old order reinstituted.

The outcome is that Kate now has two domains, with the.co.uk forwarding to the.com, and the website and e-mail service back where it belongs.

And her concert in Birmingham last week was a resounding success!

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