Imagine a prospect clicked through to your website and saw this…
Even worse, you didn’t even know your website’s domain had expired.
The risks:
- If you use an email address with the domain, you wont be able to receive/send emails — possibly missing out on business opportunities.
- Someone who has been tracking that domain may attempt to quickly snatch it from you.
- Some domain registrar companies will charge a fee to reactivate. (e.g., GoDaddy:
“If you do not renew your domain(s) during the 12-day Renewal Grace Period, you may incur a fee of $80.00 in addition to the domain renewal fee.”)
What to do:
- Perform a WHOIS (“Who is”) lookup. Every domain registrar website usually has one. You can try these (i.e., GoDaddy, Register.com, NetworkSolutions
- Make sure all the contact info for Admin, Billing and Technical contacts looks correct. Update if necessary.
- Check that you have the domain registrar account login information and test that it actually works.
- Consider setting your registration to “Auto Renew” to prevent accidentally missing the expiration date; and mke sure your domain registrar has your current credit card on file.
So take a few moments to make sure you know when important dates are approaching and that you can react quickly in an emergency. I hope you find this helpful.
-Roland
Very good content for domain owner. I faced problem with a domain that I registered more than 10 year ago with cheap domain registration .com/. At that time, I used email address from my internet provider. After years, I changed the other internet provider and I am not able to receive the email anymore. The problem is, I use GMAIL very often and I almost forgot the old email address. A very bad experience.