Domains stop resolving after placed in clienthold status.
The websites for two major publicly traded Chinese travel sites went down today as a result of their domain names being place in “ClientHold” status at the registrar.
Sites for $8 billion (market cap) Ctrip.com (NASDAQ: CTRP) and $0.6 billion eLong.com both were unavailable this morning United States time.
Both domain names were placed on “clienthold”, a status that tells the registry to not activate the domain in the DNS, and thus not resolve. Ctrip.com is registered at Network Solutions and eLong.com is registered at Register.com, both of which are owned by Web.com.
Web.com spokesperson John Herbkersman told Domain Name Wire, “This was a Whois issue and has been resolved with both sites.”
The clienthold status is often used for payment issues, but both ctrip.com and elong.com have a long time until they expire. A clienthold can also be placed for legal reasons.
As of around 12pm EST, it appears the clienthold on ctrip.com was removed. Here’s the whois record from DomainTools when the hold was in place:
As of 12pm EST, eLong.com’s website was still down. [Update: it’s back up.] Here’s the whois record from Network Solutions:
Anticareer.com says
What if they did not verify their Whois email address?
Andrew Allemann says
I thought about that. Usually when that happens you get a registrar take over page, not this.
Jen says
Ah, yes. The evil Network Solutions.
How come I’m not surprised?
Graeme says
It could be Registrant Verification related. Some registrars use client hold rather than changing DNS as it can be rectified faster. Waiting for up to 48 hours for your domain to come can be painful.