Your domain will go down if you rely on auto renew.

Don't use this guy as your domain registrar. This issue happened to me four years ago and when I raised a ticket about it, support clearly don't care and didn't fix it, and I recently had the exact same thing happen.

This time all I got from support was "Its been back up for a while now." and then they stopped responding.

When your domain is set to "auto renew", you would expect that on the day they take your payment, that the domain remains online at all times. However on the renewal day, their expiry system kicks in and takes your domain offline for a time, even if the renewal system has already taken your payment. Apparently you're supposed to manually pay the renewal beforehand to avoid this.

How they think it's acceptable that their customer's domains and all services connected to them go offline at all is beyond me.

Stop calling it auto renew, or simply increase the grace period on your domain expiry system.

I moved my domains away from them because of this.

I've used four different web hosting companies in the last year for various clients and Rack Servers are the only hosting company i would recommend without question.