One thing that I frequently spend quite a bit of time on with new clients is issues with their domain name.  If someone needs a domain name, I refer them to Godaddy.  Sometimes if they absolutely don’t want to mess with domain registration or if I know that they won’t keep the registration current, I will manage it for them and just bill them later.

While many web development companies resell domain registration along with hosting and web design, that is just not something that I have wanted to delve into for two main reasons.  First, we are just talking about a margin of a couple of dollars a year and unless you are doing a high volume, it’s just not worth it.

The second reason, and the most important one, is that when someone buys a service through me, they expect me to be able to fix it if they have a problem.  If there is an issue with their web site, I can handle it.  If it is a problem with their hosting or email, I can make sure that it is fixed.

However if I resold domain registrations and someone let their domain name expire or had their domain unlocked and the nameservers were transferred, there is literally nothing I can do about it.  The last thing I want to do is put my company in a situation where a client has an expectation that I can fix their problem and my hands are tied.  Those couple of dollars a year (see above) just aren’t worth it.

I have written post after post about this, but I can’t say strongly enough how important it is for you to protect your business domain name.  If you had a phone number for years and it had been in all your advertising and your clients had it in their phone directories, what do you think would happen if suddenly one day that phone number started directing calls to a competitor?  What do you think that would do to your business?

That is exactly what can happen if you let your domain name expire or lose control of your domain.

Here again are a few tips for protecting your domain name:

Keep Your Contact Information Current

The registrant information on file at your registrar should ALWAYS be kept current and make sure emails from your registrar don’t get sent to your SPAM filter.  Every registrar will send you reminder emails 60 to 90 days before the domain expires.

Keep Your Domain Locked

Your domain registrar should have a feature to “lock” your domain name to prevent transfers.  If it is unlocked and someone submits a transfer request, you will have to deny that request or it will automatically be transferred.  If you aren’t paying attention to emails related to your domain name or if your email isn’t current, you will have a big problem on your hands.

This should be a standard feature, you shouldn’t have to pay extra for it.

Keep your Domain Registration Independent from Your Hosting

You should never get into a situation where your domain registration is tied into your hosting.  Some registrars, like Godaddy and Network Solutions, do also offer hosting; however, one isn’t conditional on the other.  For example with Godaddy, you can register a domain, add hosting to it, and then if you later wanted to cancel the hosting you would still have the domain and be able to use it on another hosting account. (This article explains the basics of a web site and how domains, hosting, and web pages work together.)

You should be able to direct your domain name to point to any hosting service, and if you can’t then run.

I have spent hours over the past week trying to help someone who had signed up for a new hosting service with another company.  That new company not only transferred the web site files, but also their domain names to a new registrar.  Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, except for that the registrar it was transferred to is a wholesaler and the only way the site owner can manage the domain name is through the hosting AND the hosting company only allows the domain to be pointed to their own hosting service . . . essentially locking the site owner into their hosting unless they switch registrars once again.  Which brings me to the next point . . .

Plan Any Domain Registrar Changes Carefully

If you plan to switch registrars, (say for example, from DirectNic to Godaddy), make sure that transfer is absolutely what you want to do.  If you switch registrars or change the registrant information, you can’t switch again for 60 days.  When I bought a domain from an auction on SnapNames, I couldn’t transfer it over to my GoDaddy account for 60 days.  In the situation I mentioned above, the site owner is literally stuck on hosting where his site won’t function because the hosting service that the domain management is tied into won’t allow a change of nameservers and he can’t change to a registrar that would allow him that capability for another 60 days.

Never EVER Let Your Domain Expire

Let me repeat that.

Never, EVER let your domain expire.

This is a big, BIG deal.  Some people think that if you let your domain expire that you can just go back and reregister it.  NO.  That is not the case . . .  as in a great big NO.

If you let your domain expire, this is what happens.  Most registrars will give you a grace period, it’s different for each one, maybe 5 days to a week.  During the grace period, you may experience an interruption in your domain direction but you can renew as you normally would.However, there have been a couple of times that I have had an eye on a domain name and the registrar put it into expired status immediately.

After that grace period, it will go into a redemption period.  This time frame varies by registrar.  During the redemption period, you can still renew or “redeem” your domain name; however, it will cost you a redemption fee in addition to your renewal fee to do so.  The amount varies by registrar, I’ve heard between $75 to $150.

After the redemption period, the domain goes into “pending delete” status.  At that point, you can’t get it back prior to the domain dropping and it will sit there until the domain is deleted from the registry record.

Once the domain registration “drops,” it will become available and there is an entire industry around picking up dropped domains.  Trust me, it is highly unlikely that you as an individual will be able to beat a domainer in reregistering a dropped domain that has any search engine credibility at all.

What will most likely happen is that the domain will be picked up by one of these companies and held.  They will either make their money back by putting up Adsense sites on the domain and getting money from the click throughs from visitors coming to find you, or they will sell the domain back to you at a premium.  At the point, you will have to pay whatever they ask to get it back.

So again . . . don’t let your domain expire.

Yes, they are cheap and because of that many people don’t place much importance on them.  However, your business’s domain name has much greater value than the $10 a year it takes to keep the registration current.  The longer you have that domain and the more prominence you build in the search engines, the greater that value becomes.

Don’t lose that value in one fell swoop over carelessness.