Wonkette: Washington Post Cut Off From Outside World

According to a leaked memo from the Washington Post's managing editor Steve Coll, sent to internal staff (and forwarded, apparently, to the political gossip blog Wonkette), someone neglected to see a renewal notice from Network Solutions that washpost.com was set to expire, so the domain was offline for a day or so, snafuing email operations. Ooops.

There are a few lessons in this. 1) Network Solutions remains a terrible service provider, and companies still using them deserve whatever headaches they get. 2) Most competent registrars provide the option for domains to be backed up, so they won't be automatically suspended if a company doesn't respond to the expiration notices in a timely fashion. 3) Register using an address (email and postal) that someone will actually check at some point in the future. 4) Using GoDaddy, it costs $7.95 per year for domain registration. A firm like the Washington Post, which is presumably planning on being in business for a while, should go ahead and splurge for the 20-year or 100-year preregistration package.