The Importance of Auto Renewing your Domain Name

Written by: Craig Edmonds | October 30, 2009

There is no doubt that the internet is big business and is an attractive prospect for the majority of companies worldwide.

Your web site is more than likely the first stop for potential customers in the local and global market place replacing the days of old when the yellow pages directory was dominant.

And how do customers find your web site?
They type the domain name into their web browser after seeing it on a business card or printed medium or they will click on a search engine listing and click through to your web site.

Like a telephone number, your domain name is your unique identifying address on the internet so that people can find out about your business and communicate with you directly. Email is an extremely central part of your business, its the lifeline of modern communication, more often replacing the phone.

So what happens when you forget to renew your domain name?
Quite often I will have clients (those who I don’t manage their domains and they manage them themselves) calling or emailing me with one or all of the following issues:

1. I have not received any emails the last few days. Is there something wrong with the email server?

2. My web site does not seem to work. Is there something wrong with the web site?

3. There is a weird page with ads on it in place of my web site. What is going on?

Of course, to eliminate any technical issues I have a check list of items to perform a process of elimination and included on that list is to check the expiry date of the domain name.

More often than not, during these checks, I find that the client has let the domain name expire. The client has probably not intentionally let the domain expire but not renewing your domain name can run a few risks:

1. You will stop receiving emails
2. Your web site will probably stop working
3. Your registrar will probably put a holding page up in place of your web site
4. Someone else can register your domain name.

Most notably though the repercussion on your business is quite drastic. All of a sudden your current clients cant contact you, new customers wont see your web site or be able to email you and you run the risk of damaging your reputation.

Most people give their domain name second thought, but in essence its the most important part of your business because like a phone number, if people cant type your name in their web browser to contact you or email you, you WILL lose business which means you lose money.

If you lose your domain to someone else you run the risk of them selling it back to you at an extortionate amount and you have very little protection in the short term.

So how do I avoid these problems?
There are some simple things you can do to avoid the pain of allowing your domain to expire or losing your domain.

1. Most registrars will have an auto renew function in their billing system. Make sure your domain is set to auto renew on the anniversary of renewal.

2. Register your domain for many years in advance. Its possible to register your domain up to 10 years in advance.

3. Make sure the billing contact on the domain records is up to date, especially the email address. if you have spam filtering, ensure that you whitelist the company that bills you. You do not want to miss those notifications.

4. If you depend on a company to manage your domain portfolio, make sure that they have systems in place to avoid domain expiring.

Like backup solutions or anti virus software, people do not realise the importance of the domain name until the worst happens. Alot of focus is put into the web site design or the logo and seo, but all of that wont matter if you lose control of your domain.

Some Examples of Big Companies failing to Renew their domain names
A famous example of a BIG company not renewing a domain can be found at the link below where even Microsoft forgot to renew the hotmail.co.uk domain!
More about the Microsoft case here

See also the case of MP3.com who nerly lost their main domain for their 370 million dollar company.
More about the MP3.com case here

Topics: Domain Names | View Comments