Your Domain Provider Doesn’t Care About Your Businesses
This is a really boring topic but it needs to be said …
Retail shop owners don’t give the keys to their front door to anyone. Trusted employees might have one, in some cases the security company will. Through that front door there might be even extra layers of protection such as cameras, security systems and so on.
Why do retailers care so much?
The doorway to a retail shop is a vital place of passage for customers and the business assets to meet – which might be products or people. If there’s no door, customers won’t be able to access all the wonderful things inside. So it’s a given to care about who can influence it’s status.
Yet so many of us doing business online just don’t pay the same respect to our own front door, our domain.
Maybe it’s because they are cheap to buy we tend to not think about it. That of course until it’s lost…
I want you to image for a minute that tomorrow someone else owns your domain. How would you feel? What would that mean for your online business?
It would grind to a halt right?
This is a circumstance that I see way to often and it happens for a number of reasons. Here’s a few.
- You don’t renew your domain (you changed your email address is a common one).
- Your domain provider screws something up and doesn’t renew like they should.
- You get hacked and someone transfers the ownership of your domain to someone else.
Accidents are accidents but there are people who prey on these circumstances and that’s why you should care.
With a hacker your domain is a target, and good security practices are the only things that can stop that, but when you don’t renew or your domain or your provider screws up, professional domainers gobble them up (from a dropped domain list) hoping that a few are of value to someone.
When you get in touch with these domainers, expect to pay a hefty price to get it back. There is very little you can do about it, and it will take time.
Remembering your site and your business has just ground to a halt too.
So here’s some things to think about …
Your domain is not your hosting.
The domain / website thing for some can be a bit complex and you can make some bad assumptions, so let me explain it in simple terms.
- You pay to keep your domain registered and active (domain registration)
- You pay to be able to put your website files on a server somewhere (hosting)
- You pay to have a server connect your domain name to your website files (DNS = domain name server)
Now some hosts and domain registrants will wrap everything up on a nice bundle. Others will treat them all independently.Hosting and DNS are just files and configuration settings on a server somewhere, your domain is very different – it’s administrative not technical and much harder (and potentially impossible) to get back if something goes wrong.
Don’t be naive with your domains.
I want to end right now these sorts of conversations
- “Were’s your domain registered? I’m not sure I think godaddy.”
- “When does it expire? When my host tells me”
- “I’m on autobill so I don’t need to worry about it”
- “How do you pay for my domain. I think it’s part of my monthly bill I pay to hostgator.”
And I want you to realise this.
- Your domain registrant or host doesn’t care about your domain as much as you do – by a mile.
- Things change a lot in a year, emails, payment methods
- There is no such thing as a foolproof host – things will go wrong for a few.
So take come control of what’s important.
Here’s what I want you to do:
Get your domains organised. Put them all with one provider, the one you register your new ones with so you know where they all are.
Figure out your expiry dates for each and set yourself two email reminders. A week out, and on the day of expiry with your preferred reminder system.
Then find a second reminder system that send you a message to a different channel like SMS (http://ohdontforget.com/) and set up the same reminders.
So how organised are you with an asset that could make or break your business. Do you have control over the situation or do you have faith in someone who just doesn’t care?
Leave a comment