Expiration panic: Don't let this happen to you

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Ouch! One of our clients forgot to renew his company domain name and woke up this morning to find an ad where his site had been.

Fortunately, there’s a waiting period of 30 days on domains, during which your registrar cannot sell the URL out from under you. Our client can go pay his bill and get the domain restored to his control. But in the meantime, his site is down (thank goodness he did not have a retail site on the day after Thanksgiving!) and his email accounts are not functioning. This can take anywhere from a couple hours to a few days to be resolved, depending on the registrar – you’re at the mercy of how fast that company works.

And, if chance is not on your side, you may find that Google’s search engine spiders come to crawl your site when it’s down, leading to a sharp drop in search traffic.

What can you do to make sure this doesn’t happen to you?

Renew your domain for multiple years. We believe this helps your search engine rankings in Google as well. Google likes seeing that you’re committed to owning your site for years.

Make sure you know when your domain expires and put a note on your calendar well in advance to renew. Don’t depend on your domain registrar sending you notification, as you might overlook it or it might use out-of-date contact information. (While you’re thinking about it: Go make sure your domain registrar has your current contact information on file.)

Transfer your domain to our registrar (you still retain ownership) and we will manage and renew the domain for you.

There are many, many details that you must track to run an effective website. Domain name registration is just one of them. Don’t let a small detail bring your entire site (and email) down.

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