Joshua Strebel, CEO and Co-Founder of Pagely and Northstack, spoke at WordCamp Phoenix and shared an interesting story about how an expired domain name cost his company $57,000. He later shared the video of his WCP keynote via Twitter, and Adam Strong shared it with me:
The moral of the story is that domain registrants, including domain name investors, need to be mindful of their domain name renewals. Here are 5 things registrants should do to prevent domain names from expiring:
- Registrants should keep their correct email address on file with their domain registrar.
- Registrants should make sure registrar emails do not get caught by a spam filter or otherwise be unseen.
- A valid credit card should stay on file at the registrar, and the credit card should be updated with valid expiry date information before it expires.
- Setup auto-renew on domain names so they automatically renew each year.
- Renew domain names for several years in advance (and keep doing this periodically while adhering to the suggestions above).
At the end of the day, Joshua and his company were lucky to be able to recover the domain name. It seems like they caught the error in enough time that the domain name did not go to auction or otherwise get picked up by another registrant or even the registrar.
That was a really good talk aside from the domain expiration story. Lot of good wisdom there from a successful bootstrapped founder.
get a grip guys.. and max it out.10 years upfront is $90 bucks on your credit card and you have one BIG sorrow less… what’s with that one year registration BS? If you’re an internet company your domain is the HEART of it. The moment it stops pumping you’re dead and out of business..
Some businesses are still so laissez-faire when it comes to their Digital Assets – Nomain Names and Social Media Handles. We come across it all the time with new Clients.
Domain Names!
That $57,000 number is the part that should worry every domain owner — the renewal would have cost less than twenty dollars. It’s never the price that gets people; it’s the single point of failure: one email address on file, one card on file, one inbox nobody checks. I look up the registry expiry dates on all my domains quarterly now and keep monitoring on a channel separate from my registrar. Expensive lesson for them, cheap lesson for the rest of us.