The same thing happened with a Network Solutions hosting plan I had. They auto-renewed me when I had over one month before renewal. Their service had been horrible on Drupal sites. Just the DNS resolution to my hosting account was taking 2-3 seconds. I enlisted an up-time monitoring service and found that my site was down frequently even while I was paying for this renewal I did not want. Shame such a dominant company in the 90s has basically laid the road map for shady hosting.
Yes, network solutions is also terrible. I still have a domain with them, and it takes five clicks just to get to the DNS management interface. Every step in the way they try to make as unclear as possible by flashing banners and shiny buttons in your face to get you to buy more of their services.
