I accidentally marked this thread as Solved. The issue is NOT resolved. The domain is still under serverHold and returns NXDOMAIN. Please reopen this thread and continue investigating the issue. Thank you.

The serverHold status on your domain is applied at the registry level for the .online TLD, which removes the domain from the zone file entirely and causes the NXDOMAIN you are seeing from all resolvers. The "Waiting for DNS to propagate" state in the dashboard is a downstream effect of the domain being absent from the zone. This is outside what we can act on, and we are not able to request its removal or investigate the reason it was applied. We also cannot offer a refund, replacement domain, or escalation path for this.

This does not appear to be consistent with Railway's own documentation or previous Railway support cases.

Railway's documentation states that for domains purchased through Railway, Railway is listed as the registrant contact and handles all registry communications on the customer's behalf.

There is also a previous Central Station case involving a Railway-purchased domain (wcore.xyz) with the exact same serverHold / NXDOMAIN issue. In that case, a Railway employee contacted Name.com on the customer's behalf, and the hold was eventually released.

My domain h1stup-education.online was purchased directly through Railway, so I do not have direct control over the registrar account or registry communications.

Please escalate this to a human Railway support employee and contact the registrar / Name.com on my behalf to determine why the .online registry applied serverHold and what is required to remove it.

The website is an educational platform for Ukrainian History exam preparation and contains no phishing, malware, spam, or abusive content.

Please do not mark this issue as solved. The domain is still completely unavailable and returns NXDOMAIN.

You're right, and the earlier reply on this thread was wrong. Domains purchased through Railway sit in our registrar account with Railway as the contact of record, which is exactly why you can't act on this yourself and why contacting the registrar is ours to do. We're opening that request now.

A few details you don't have yet.

The hold was applied on 17 August at 15:37 UTC, about ten days before you noticed the domain had stopped resolving. The registry behind .online is Radix rather than Name.com, so the request goes to Name.com first and they raise it with Radix on our behalf. However, after sending it, they don't usually tell us why there is a hold.

The $2 you paid for the domain has been credited back to your account.

There's nothing to change on your side. "Waiting for DNS to propagate" is just our verification check failing to resolve a name that isn't currently in the zone, and it will clear on its own if the hold comes off. Your service and its .up.railway.app domain aren't affected either way.

I'll update this thread as soon as we hear back.

Bump!

Hi Angelo,

I wanted to follow up again regarding h1stup-education.online.

It has now been several weeks since the domain was placed under serverHold, and it is still returning NXDOMAIN and remains completely unavailable.

Could you please let me know if there has been any response from Name.com or Radix, or if the case can be escalated further?

Since the domain was purchased through Railway, I’m unable to contact the registrar directly, so I’m fully dependent on Railway for this issue.

I’d really appreciate any update on the current status and next steps.

Thank you.