Renewing Important Domains Is…Important!

Some of you football fans out there might have heard that the Dallas Cowboys have been having a rough season. Some of you domain fans out there might have heard that on top of this, they let their domain name expire at the worst possible time. While we don’t want to pour salt on the wound, this situation was just too apropos to pass up.

Earlier this week, when the Cowboys were busy firing their head coach, fans were busy trying to get to their website only to find a parking page stating the the domain was for sale. Doh!

This is a perfect example of why it is important to keep tabs on the domains that are important to you. Our team is all too familiar with support requests where emails, employees, or credit cards have changed, and as a result the domain expires and the website goes offline.

To help avoid any unnecessary panic, there are a number of steps you can take to help ensure that this type of thing does not happen to a domain that may not just be important, but your business and your livelihood.

Make sure your contact information is up to date.

This is essential. Domain registrars will communicate important information regarding your account to the email address you have on file. If that email address is not current, you will miss things like renewal notices and “last chance” emails. When those emails are missed, your next indicator that your domain needs to be renewed will be when you notice that your website no longer works.

Register your domain for multiple years in advance.

If a domain is really important to you, one thing you might consider is registering for two, five, even ten years. Of course, this means that years down the road you will still need to remember to renew, or at the very least make sure your contact information is up to date so you don’t miss those important renewal notices.

Utilize automatic billing services.

At Name.com we offer what is called an Automatic Billing Engine (ABE). You can use this service to allow us to attempt to automatically renew the domains you select up to 45 days prior to their expiration. It’s a great service, and we highly recommend using automatic billing if you don’t want to deal with the hassle of annual renewals. But again, this requires your credit card and contact information that you have on file be accurate and up to date. If not, our attempt to automatically charge you will fail and you will be back at square one.

You’ll notice that even though there are some ways to make the renewal of your domains as easy on you as possible, the most important thing you can do is double check that your account information is accurate. However, stuff does happen, and in the event that it does our support staff is here to help get you back online as soon as possible.