At five in the morning, a client's brand domain vanished from the internet. The server didn't go down and the code didn't break. Radix, the company that runs the .store extension, has a bot that reviews names, and that bot decided ours looked like others reported for fraud. It suspended the domain without warning and without opening the site even once.
Thirteen minutes later, our monitoring agent had already raised the alarm. While everyone was asleep, another agent ran the diagnosis: the server was healthy, the certificate valid, the site intact. The domain had simply stopped existing for the internet, and the order came from Radix.
By the time we got there, the machine work was done and what was left were the decisions. We paused the campaign so we wouldn't pay for clicks to a dead address. We wrote to Radix with proof that the site was legitimate, even though its only recourse is a form with no response deadline. And we decided not to wait.
That's where we almost repeated the mistake. In the rush, we bought a replacement domain on another extension. Before using it, an agent checked who ran it: Radix again, the same company that had just shut us off. We dropped it within minutes. We picked one from another operator, and the agents handled the rest: DNS, certificate, site, monitoring and the ad's address, all pointing to the new name. An hour and fifteen minutes after the suspension, the site was responding again.
Separating the cause from what made it worse was our job. The cause wasn't someone else's bot. It was a human decision: we chose that extension because the name sounded good, without checking who runs it. It got worse because the brand depended on a single domain with paid advertising on top, and because nobody warns you before a suspension like that.
That gave us two rules our agents now apply to every domain we register, ours or a client's. Before paying, an agent checks who runs the extension and whether it has a history of suspending domains by name pattern; if it does, that domain doesn't get bought. Radix runs, among others, .store, .site, .online, .tech and .website: if you have a brand with advertising on one of them, it's worth checking today. And every brand with paid traffic has its move plan written down, so the agents can carry it out in half a day and we keep the decisions that can't be delegated.