Last Updated on August 26, 2021
One perk of my job is that I can live wherever I want. All I need is an internet connection. For a time, I lived in Port Townsend, Washington. It’s a lovely, small town. The largest newspaper in the area is the Peninsula Daily News. I loved the newspaper except for their propensity toward puns. I’m not a fan of puns!
One day I went to their site and instead of seeing their regular home page I saw this:
This pun-free page is what Register.com displays when a customer forgets to pay their domain name registration fees. Once the invoice is paid, the newspaper site was restored.
Sadly, I’ve seen the same thing happen with customer’s sites.
One organization’s domain name registration was by the organization’s secretary. She used her personal email address as the official email address for the GoDaddy contact. When she unexpectedly passed away, no one thought to go in and change the details of the domain name registration. The group eventually was able to access their domain name, but it took some time and effort.
It’s vital to keep your domain name registration current. Without that piece in place, your website will go down and you’ll even lose access to any email address associated with your domain name.
Step one of taking charge of this issue is to set the domain names up to auto-renew. If you change credit cards or your credit card expires, be sure to go in and update that information.
Make yourself a note to double-check on your domain name registration. It’s OK to be paranoid about this.
Also, if you’re using Register.com you’re probably paying too much for your domain name registration. Check with your website host or with GoDaddy. Your domain registration costs should decrease by significantly.
