Domain Name Registration and Renewal

Your domain name is the face of your business to customers and prospects via your website, is required for email communication and is very likely used to provide employees and customers access to your business for things like remote access, portals, contact forms, support requests, and more. The impact of an expired (or lost) domain is costly and registration status should be monitored. The Registrar is where your domain name is registered and maintained and is probably not in the same place your website, email and DNS are hosted.

If your domain is not renewed on time, reputable Registrars provide a grace period when your domain expires, however all of the services related to your domain stop working the minute it’s put into the “grace period”. That means emails bounce, website(s) stops working, employee VPN and remote access services may be affected, and remote applications may stop working.

The impact to your business if your domain expires can result in lost business, loss of access to critical systems, lost (or significantly delayed) email and more depending on how many your services use it. If this happens mid-day Friday before a long holiday weekend you might not even realize there’s an issue until you’re back to work 3 or 4 days later.

Paying attention is the best way to avoid letting your domain name lapse or expire. And partnering with an IT Provider that has additional tools to monitor your domain, website, email and other services is added protection against your domain name(s) expiring.

Here are the things you need to know about your domain name:

  1. What domain name(s) does your company have registered? Which domain(s) do you use?

  2. What services and applications use your domain(s). These typically include your website, email, some applications, remote access, and SSL Certificates for secure sites.

  3. What Registrar are your domain name(s) registered at? (bluehost, Network Solutions, GoDaddy, etc). Are your domains at more than one Registrar? If so, consider consolidating them to one Registrar for ease of management.

  4. Do you have the Administrator Login to the Registrar? (Who else knows the login?)

  5. Is the information in the registration correct? That includes up to date credit card information as well as contact information for the administrative, billing and technical contacts you want associated with your domain(s). And make sure your company name is correct!

  6. What is the renewal date for the domain? Is the domain set to automatically renew or manually renew? Either is fine, but if it’s manual that means someone must login to renew it!