Comment by russellbeattie

3 hours ago

Sorry for the long post, but it may be relevant to you.

I would share my personal website which I owned for 25+ years, but AWS deregistered it because of $36.

In case you use AWS as a registrar, be warned: If your account is "closed", they will release your domains. In other words, they make them available as if they were expired. Immediately.

Short summary: I consolidated my domains at AWS years ago just to make it easier to manage everything from one spot. Earlier last year, my credit card I used for auto payments didn't have the $18 I pay for monthly costs. I didn't notice, until my email stopped working because my account was "suspended" due to non payment after a couple months.

When AWS suspended the account, they turned off DNS routing which I managed from Route 53, so not only did my websites stop working, so did my email account (which had DNS entries to route to Gmail).

So I went to log in to pay my bill, but in the time since I had last signed in, AWS had added two factor authentication. But since I couldn't get my email, I couldn't log in. Quiz: How does one pay AWS if you can't log into your account? You cant. How do you submit a ticket? Create a new account, submit a ticket about the old account from there (you still can't pay). And then wait. And then send in a notarized form plus forms of identity. It took over a two months to resolve. Meanwhile, my account went from suspended to "closed".

I put that in quotes because when I was finally able to get my log in working, my account was as it was before with all data and setup intact.

Except for all my domains.

They had been deregistered, despite having paid for years more. AWS cancelled and released my domains without my permission. They actively deleted them from the register list, so anyone out there could buy them.

russellbeattie.com was no longer mine. In addition to the other 6 domains I used.

Because of the SEO of my personal blog, some asshole had added my domain to an "add/drop" service, so it was instantly snapped up and is now used as a scam website. They also have access to all my email, which I've used for everything from Apple to Microsoft to Google and more.

So, I'd love to share my blog with you, but Amazon screwed me so badly it's incredible.