Is Your Domain Name Safe?
A truly horrible and dumb thing happened the other day. I was just leaving the house to drop off some toys to the childrens ward of our local hospital and decided to just quickly check my email before I left. This one single moment saved me hundreds of hours of work and potentially thousands of dollars.
Why?
Because I’d forgotten to renew my primary domain name. Not the Homeofficebuddy.com domain. No far, far worse. I forgot to renew a domain that I use for all my private email, membership sites, logins etc etc. If I’d lost control of this domain the trouble it would have caused was absolutely massive. I broke into a sweat even thinking about it.
Of course I immediately paid my domain renewal fees and set the domain to automatically renew in future to stop this from ever happening again. Fortunately the domain had not been snapped up by somebody else. There are domain investors out there who are waiting to pounce on your domain and register it themselves if you ever forgot to pay your dues. There are even companies specializing in offering this as a service. Scary huh? Oh they’d sell your domain back to you - for about 100 times the original cost.
Now I don’t know if it was karma intervening because I was dropping off toys to a childrens ward or just pure good luck on my part but either way it’s ok. That domain is still under my control and I didn’t just waste almost 5 years of work.
If you have a domain that’s important to you then make sure it’s set to automatically renew. Better again when you are actually renewing it why not do so for 4 or 5 years? At least that would mean for the next few years you wouldn’t have to worry about domain fees and you’d never run the risk of making a really, really, really stupid mistake like mine.
Until the next time
Niall