Think about it for a moment . How important is your domain name to your business, or to your personal brand? How much time and effort has gone into establishing it’s rank online, and how much money does that investment represent to your company and to you? What is the single address you use most often every day?
Now, ask yourself this. Just how many domain names do you own, and when do they come up for renewal?
To a professional “Domainer” (someone who invests in domain names on a large scale – either to hold as an investment for future re-sale or to develop like any other piece of real estate), that answer would be clear. They would have a complete list of their “properties” and would also know exactly where their titles were registered and when they would need to be renewed.
To a casual or ‘incidental’ domain owner (like most of us, someone who owns their company name and maybe a couple of ‘idea domains’ on the back burner, so to speak), renewal happens when the Domain Registry kindly reminds us to pay them again, if we have not set up ‘auto-renew’.
I have fallen into the latter category, but I am about to change my ways! Here’s why. Just this week, a friend of mine narrowly avoided a nasty surprise. They owned – or so they thought – their company’s domain name. In fact, they had owned it for a few years. It was set up to ‘auto-renew’, so everything was safe, right? WRONG!
That lovely little ‘auto-renew’ didn’t happen this time. My friend’s credit card had been used as the payment-on-record for their URL. That same credit card had recently been compromised and the number changed as a security precaution by their bank. That’s how we want our banks to protect us, right? You’d think so!
In this case, however, that simple step for security’s sake nearly cost them a name on which their business – all their advertising, recognition, brand awareness – was based. Fortunately, out of a casual conversation, they happened to look up their name on www.whois.com . Imagine their surprise when they found that their domain had – recently, whew! – missed being renewed.
They were lucky! There is a grace period to protect us all if that situation occurs. However, it’s not a place where any of us want to be. MORAL of this story: DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU! (Have you heard the FourSquare story?)
Check your domains, make a list, set up a renewal reminder for yourself.
Who owns your URL? Make sure that answer is always “YOU”!
Excellent post!
To add to this, make sure you keep your email address up-to-date on your domain registration because most registrars send renewal notices by email only. If you don’t get your renewal notice or the “failure for auto-renew to complete notice”, you are at risk of losing your domain. When the domain expires, your website will stop resolving. Companies typically notice at this point but most companies cannot afford to be down for even an hour. Now remember that many companies register multiple domains in a variety of extensions and for multiple products/services and forward them to one main website. If these forwarded domains expire, many companies don’t notice until it is too late and someone else has snapped up their brand and diverts traffic elsewhere.
At Webnames.ca we schedule mulitple renewal notices by email, then if the domain has not been renewed, we send a snail mail notice, and then finally a courtesy phone call the week before expiry.
Think this is overkill? We have saved numerous companies from the same fate as Foursquare. With Google.ca, Yahoo! and so many of the big brands using us as their registrar of record we figured a bit of overkill was needed and this has also served our small business clients well.
Hope this is helpful.