Managed Domain Name Renewal

Your domain name is the heart of both your website and your marketing operations. It is the central hub through which you are found and your services are sold.

As such, it is an incredibly valuable asset that needs to be protected and managed carefully. The unfortunate reality is that most business owners don’t know how to do this.

That’s where we come in!

A domain name is a requirement to have a website and to operate custom email addresses. It tells your customers, clients, or members where to find you on the internet.

Without it, there is no website and you can’t have custom email addresses.

This is often one of the very first things new business owners set up, as it should be. Picking the right domain name and managing it properly is absolutely critical to the success of your organization.

You might be thinking, “I have my domain on auto-renew, how could it ever expire?”

While this is a nice thought, it is incredibly naïve. Most of my clients have their domains on auto-renew, yet their domains expire all the time.

So how does it happen?

Typically, it looks something like this:

1. The credit card they have on file expires
2. They either haven’t updated the email address on file with the registrar to one they use, or the expiration alert emails are all going to spam
3. The domain expires and they still aren’t aware because they also don’t have any uptime monitoring
4. They only find out it has expired when it’s too late, and their old website has been replaced with spam or adult content, or worse

The following are all hard requirements for anyone with a revenue-generating website:

• Regularly log in to your registrar and make sure the contact email address is up-to-date
• Don’t use Network Solutions / Register.com / Web.com
• Add a backup email address if possible
• Make sure the email address isn’t one at your domain (e.g., I wouldn’t use an email address ending in @pagecrafter.com for my registrar account containing pagecrafter.com)
• Update the WHOIS information on your domain yearly, as prompted by your registrar
• Verify that email alerts from your registrar are not going to spam (set up a whitelist rule if necessary)
• Set a reminder to update your credit card information regularly so that it doesn’t expire
• Set up a backup credit card if you’re able as a backup payment method in case the first one fails
• Verify that the domain is set to auto-renew (it should ALWAYS be on auto-renew – you can always cancel if you don’t want it anymore)
• Set up uptime monitoring with automatic alerts for downtime, which should alert you as soon as the domain expires

OR

Sign up for our managed domain name renewal service, where we handle all of this for you and ensure that your domain never expires in the first place.

You absolutely need to do one of these two options, otherwise you are risking the entire future of your business on something that’s both inevitable (if you do nothing) and completely avoidable.

As soon as your domain name expires, your website will go completely offline and all of your email will stop working. Depending on the registrar, visitors to your website may get an error of some kind, or they may see a landing page from the registrar saying something along the lines of, “this domain is pending deletion.”

Until the domain is renewed and the settings restored, things will continue being broken and displaying errors.

If you host your website with us, our included uptime monitoring will alert us of the issue immediately and we can work with you to get the domain renewed immediately and hopefully get everything up and running with minimal downtime. Most registrars charge a fee of $30-100 to restore a domain that has recently expired.

If you don’t host with us, you may not realize the domain has expired until it’s too late. While the time period varies by registrar, typically after about 30 days your domain while be made available for the general public to buy.

This is very bad news for you.

What will happen is that an automated, third-party buyer will snipe up your newly-available domain name. The best-case scenario is that they display ads there, redirect it to a shopping website, or try to sell it back to you at an outrageously marked-up price.

Worst-case scenario is that they set up an adult-content website or use it to distribute malware.

Imagine that people go to the website listed on your business card, only to discover that it’s nothing but adult content or it downloads viruses to their computer.

Could your business survive?

Additionally, if you don’t get your domain back, your email accounts at the domain will never work again. If you have any accounts across the web that use an address there, you may lose access to them forever.

Or worse: if the new owner is ill-intentioned, they could gain access to your accounts like Google, Facebook, or more. This is because if they know what email address you were using, they can simply reset the password since they now control your email inbox.

It’s also worth noting that if you lose access to your registrar account and the email address you listed is the one at your domain, it may be nearly impossible to renew the domain even if you’re within the grace period. For this reason, I strongly recommend you stay very on-top-of these things and also use a different email address on the account.

As you can imagine, this whole process can be hugely expensive and incredibly damaging to the reputation of your organization.

Managed Domain Name Renewal means we handle everything for you and deal with any and all issues related to domain name registration. Your domain won’t ever expire by accident.

We’ve been doing this a long time and we have systems in place to make sure everything goes smoothly. Additionally, we have numerous safeguards in place to prevent problems before they happen.

It’s basically total peace-of-mind so that you never have to worry about losing your domain.

If you’re at a terrible registrar like Network Solutions / Register.com / Web.com, it’s about the same price as what you’re already paying. Prices start at just $45/year.

This is a bit more than standard registrars (the kind that don’t price-gouge as excessively), but the upside is that you don’t have to worry about losing it or handling other issues like ICANN/WHOIS information, DNS management, or domain privacy.

The peace of mind alone may just be worth it to you.

In addition to just registering your domain and making sure it never expires, we also include other premium upgrades for your domain:

• DNS hosting and management
• Domain privacy
• ICANN/WHOIS updates as-needed
• Advice and expertise regarding domain management and additional domain purchases

If you’re always on top of things, it is possible to do it all yourself. But if there’s any chance you might not be on top of it or if it has ever expired on you before, it’s worth it to spend slightly more on Managed Domain Name Registration.

If an extra $20/year sounds like a good price to never have to worry about this, fill out the form below and we’ll get you set up.