I am Joanna Puchala of Flowmove yoga and I want to share with you a drama I experienced recently with my website, caused by the UK leaving the EU on 1st January, 2021.
There had not been any work scheduled and there was no error messages. My website designer said he could see all the files there and it seemed as normal. But, when typing in the website name, it could not be found……So it must be the domain name. We checked the account. All in order, nothing outstanding. In any case there would have been fair warning if it was an account problem. So we raised a trouble ticket with the web hosting company. They replied pretty quickly that it was nothing to do with their systems. But they pointed to the problem was that our domain name has been suspended.
What did this mean?
After some searching we discovered that the rule is that domain names with .eu require the registrant (us) to be resident in an EU country. When the UK left the EU, that condition was no longer met. They seem to have suspended every .eu domain with a UK postal address.
The simple solution to this was to change the postal address and we asked the hosting company to change it to my address in Poland. We could not do this ourselves, we only had access to the address used for our account with the hosting company. They did this for us and suggested I send an email directly to eurid.eu to ask them to update my details as a matter of urgency so that it conformed to this rule and remove the suspension. Thankfully they responded in a day. I checked my website and hurrah! Back in business! https://flowmove.eu is working again with all my new aerial yoga material. Fortunately my yoga video courses where all held on a separate website and my existing clients were not inconvenienced much. But this was my marketing website, so it was important to get it back in operation as quickly as possible.
Apparently 90,000 websites and email accounts using .eu registered to a UK postal address were caught out by this Brexit issue. Ironically the Pro-Brexit campaign group leave.eu had to swiftly move their website to am EU address in Ireland.