By PHYLLIS ZORN

Staff writer

Marion’s city website was down more than 72 hours because the city’s domain contract expired Thursday.

It went down Saturday, and a page that appeared in its place indicated the city didn’t pay its domain bill.

The city also lost its ability to send and receive email.

City Clerk Janet Robinson said Tuesday that the domain had been set up to auto-renew, but the credit card connected to the renewal was linked to an expired card that had belonged to previous city clerk Tiffany Jeffrey.

“It did not go through,” Robinson said.

Mayor Mike Powers and interim Police Chief Zach Hudlin had noted problems with email over the weekend, but city staff apparently had been unaware the website was down until they arrived for work Tuesday, after the Presidents Day holiday.

When office staff arrived at work Tuesday and found the website was down, they contacted the city’s information technology consultant, Lloyd Davies at Great Plains Computers and Networking.

Davies promptly got the page back up for city workers, but it still was not available to all computer users.

For other Internet users, links between the site’s numerical address and domain name still had to be refreshed. That can take between two hours and seven days.

“I know we normally renew about this time,” Davies said.

An “under construction” notice with instructions on how to replace the page with another page or bid to take over the page appeared instead.

Davies said Tuesday morning that emails sent to the city still had not arrived.

The emails were not bouncing back to senders, but neither were they being sent to the city’s email registry.

Instead, emails were redirected to a different delivery host that IP trackers say is in Finland or the Netherlands.

What will happen to the emails after that remains unclear.

Auto-renew arrangements prevent web pages from expiring, and domain registries typically notify organization whose domains they register their domain is about to expire.

Spammers also send emails trying to get organizations to renew by sending payment to them.

Once a domain name expires, it’s possible to recover the page by making payment soon enough.

In most cases, the first 30 days after a domain expires, the domain is placed on hold and can be renewed without paying an additional fee. An additional email telling the customer registration has expired is sent within five days.

From day 31 to day 60 after registration expired, the domain name is prepared for deletion.

It could be possible to keep a domain if the customer contacts the manager of the registry involved. An extra fee is charged in an amount set by the domain registry.

When a domain has been expired for 60 days, it will be deleted and others will be able to bid buy the name.