Tell HN: Tonic (.to registrar) took away my domain without notice
Earlier this year I acquired a small software project named pxl.to
I liked it, because it helped small businesses to improve tracking with marketing campaigns, create QR codes and link-in-bio pages.
The previous owner ran AppSumo campaigns and quickly amassed a loyal audience to the product. 4.5 to 5 star rating across the board. People really liked it.
Yesterday evening I started noticing something strange: the DNS was not propagating anymore. Country by country I could see pxl.to not being reachable. My email stoppped working as well.
After getting in touch with Namecheap they said the issue is with the registrar. After getting in touch with them, they said they received a complaint about a phishing site being redirected to from pxl.to
No warning was issued. My domain was disabled and that's about as much as support will tell me.
One person decided to disable my domain, along with a business I invested $50k of my savings to acquire. The same thing happened to me with one of the domains I use for T.LY URL Shortener, twtr.to. It was disabled without any prior warning, and I only found out when it suddenly stopped working. I contacted the registrar, and I’m currently waiting to hear back from them. It’s frustrating how a single decision like this can disrupt an entire business operation without notice or explanation. ... why write on HN about it? What do you think the people here can or will do? There's an endless trickle of these kind of posts, I have never seen one with a resolution that satisfied the OP. Two reasons: 1. Maybe someone reads thhis and in fact can help or knows more than I do at this moment 2. Other readers might want others were victims as well and possibly find a solution in this thread 3. Warn others to not buy .to domains if this shit occurs For one thing, we now know not to use .to