Renewing Domain Names

I have been using BulkRegister.com for my domains for a few years now.  They added a new feature this last year called auto-renew, so I eagerly setup my domains to auto-renew.  Apparently, this also has the side-effect that no emails are sent at your normal renewal time, since it is supposed to happen automatically.  All the sudden this morning my domain stops resolving while I'm making some minor changes with my web-host's help, and it ends up having nothing to do with my web-host afterall -- BulkRegister just did NOT auto-renew my domain.

Its manually renewed now, thank goodness for grace periods, but it will likely take a few days to start resolving again, and I will end up losing both business and lots of email.  I will probably also look really bad, since people will likely assume it is due to my web-host, WebHost4Life.com, which I am always recommending to folks as the best.  Well, WebHost4Life is still great if anyone cares, and my mirror domain, MicrosoftArchitect.com, is still up and running just fine with the changes we made -- please use Wilson as your referal if you sign up with them.

BulkRegister's email response to me was to not worry since I have auto-renew setup for my domain -- which seems to be very much ignoring the problem.  Their phone support told me I should have received emails so why didn't I respond, so I had to point out their own policy of not sending such emails with auto-renew.  The tech then proceeded to tell me I should call billing during normal business hours since he couldn't help with the rest of my questions.  I guess the moral is don't trust any automated features -- and always keep up with your domains.