I renewed it (or at least I thought I did.)
I could not update the website, so I signed in and renewed. It is a $25 fee. I used a credit card. After I did that back on Sept. 6, I updated the website and it was accessed throughout September. Now I find out that it cannot be acessed, it was not renewed, and I cannot find a charge on the credit card. Why could I update the website? Is that normal practice for registrar/hosting company to allow you to update the site without the credit card bill going through? I believe www.doteasy messed up. I have had the domain registered with www.doteasy.com but the domain record servers modified to point to www.arendkay.net servers where website is hosted.
It will not be the first time I have had trouble with www.doteasy.com. I had problems with a page not displaying properly and I posted to the MS Frontpage newsgroup. I was told by MS-MVP that the server did not have the latest updates for the Frontpage extensions installed. I notified doteasy and they installed them and the problem went away.
I had trouble with smart quotes showing up as ?s one time. After posting to the MS Frontpage message board serveral times, person determined that the problem must be with the server. I reduced the hosting package to without Frontpage extensions and the site was then hosted on a different server with www.doteasy.com. The problem went away.
Based on the Whois record it is evident that the domain was not renewed. However I thought it was because I tried to renew it and then I was updating the site.