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A Namecheap bug got my domain suspended ⚓

05 May 2026

My primary domain (captnemo.in, where you’re reading this) was suspended by my registry (.in) for 3 hours last night (4th May 2026).

I discovered the issue roughly 30 minutes after it happened, at around 22:45 CET and managed to get on chat with a Namecheap representative in the next 30 minutes, and both domains unsuspended in another 90 minutes or so. It took a lot of waiting for support to “unlock” the domain so I could go and edit the whois records.

The reason for suspension, as mentioned in the namecheap dashboard was “invalid whois”. For context, the .IN TLD does not support whois privacy. I was aware of this limitation, and had never enabled WhoisGuard on these domains. In fact, Namecheap does not let you enable or purchase WhoisGuard for .in domains. The only WHOIS information I’d ever submitted to namecheap was my actual address in India.

However, a namecheap bug (as confirmed below) led to an issue where domains that were transferred into namecheap (and not purchased on namecheap) had whoisguard applied, against the registry policy. The .IN registry obviously didn’t like this and suspended the domain.

It appears that WhoisGuard contacts were assigned to your domains after the transfer due to a bug (tracking #2859). We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. Per our check, our Support Team has resolved the issue via your recent chat with us, and everything should be working as expected. If you notice anything unusual or need further assistance, feel free to reach out, we’re always here to help!

Namecheap had sent me a single email warning me about this, exactly one week prior. I regularly get and ignore whois correction emails, because I know my address hasn’t changed. The usual ones say: “Reminder: Update your domain contact information”. While this one said “Reminder: Update your .IN contact details”.

The text is as follows:

If you’ve already taken care of this, please disregard this reminder.

Your .IN domain contact details are listed using privacy protection, which is not permitted by the registry and may lead to domain suspension.

To avoid this, please update your contact information with your real details as soon as possible using our step-by-step guide.

I understood my chosen TLD’s limitations, and had accurate information submitted to Namecheap, but Namecheap overwrote it, then sent me a badly worded warning about it. Even more annoying, because it is sent as a reminder, it does not show up in the Namecheap account Inbox Messages, which is supposed to hold “all communication sent to the account related to the services”.

Thankfully, I was able to recover from this in a few hours, but it was stressful, especially at midnight. Partial blame also goes to NIXI, which is among the very few registries in the world avoiding domain privacy (and thus creating edge cases like this). It has also tried to enforce KYC requirements for .in domain registrations, which is absurd for such a large TLD. See Medianama coverage on this for a good read.

Rough Advice:

  1. Don’t use a ccTLD. Pick a gTLD, ideally one that has been there forever such as .com. ccTLDs give too much power over the internet to countries.
  2. Ensure you can always login to your registrar even if your email goes down.
  3. Ensure you can always login to your mailhost even if your domain goes away.

Appendix

  • I had 3 .in domains on namecheap. The one I’d purchased on Namecheap was not suspended, the other 2 were.
  • I’m lucky that I happened to open my domain and notice the issue quite quickly. I run gatus on my homeserver, but it has been down for a while. Need to setup better monitoring.
  • Namecheap still shows REDACTED FOR PRIVACY on all 3 of my domains. With the exception of two fields (Province/Country). Namecheap has confirmed to me that this is compliant. I’m not sure if I trust them completely.
Published on May 05, 2026
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