Apologies if this is the wrong community. I spent some time searching for a good one, and this seemed to be fairly applicable.
I’ve owned several domains over the years, but recently I purchased another one (goat.rest) to house a little side project I was working on. For about two weeks, everything was running fine, and then out of the blue the site disappeared. After some investigation, I figured out that the domain had been suspended by the registry, with seemingly no reason or course of action to get it back. I triple-checked, and although the TLD for the domain is intended for restaurants, it should be open for other uses too. The site wasn’t spammy, explicit, or in any way content that would be cause for removal. I sent an email to the company that owns the TLD, and three days later the block was removed, and hours later I got an incredibly vague and short email stating as such.
While the site was down, I did a little research and found a post where someone had a similar issue, but I haven’t been able to find much else. Do registries just randomly, automatically suspend domains when they want to?
I wrote a blog post going into a little more detail about the whole situation, but mainly I’m just really curious about the question I asked in the title. Am I just super unlucky to have this happen to me, or have other people experienced a similar situation?
It’s important to know who owns the gTLD because that can really impact the reliability and fuckery, they’re not all equal. People have been bitten by the regional ones (famously a lot of .ml sites got taken down at once, and also .af banning queer.af), as well as the less common ones owned by random independent companies. So if you register .rest or .bar, do you trust Punto 2012 to manage it well for you.
These guys only own two TLDs so it looks like you were unlucky and picked one that doesn’t care about due process. I’ve seen much more questionable domains survive. 4chan is still up fine but I’d imagine 4chan.bar wouldn’t last long.