Ned OMeara shared a post on LinkedIn, and he gave me permission to share it here because the message is important. Domain registrants, and particularly domain investors, need to create a plan to protect their business assets for when they die.

Ned shared a story about a client of his who purchased one of his three letter .com domain names many years ago. When he recently noticed it was sold in an expiry auction, he learned that his client had died. It seemed apparent that renewal notices sent to his client’s email address went unseen, and the domain name was not renewed by the client’s next of kin:

When a domain name transfers to a different domain registrar, the nameservers remain the same until they are changed. When a domain name uses the initial registrar’s default nameservers, which is often what people use for forwarding, the nameservers will not resolve after the domain name is transferred. As a result, a domain name that forwards to a different domain name, will no longer forward correctly.

I maintained a small portfolio of domain names at Enom for many years. These names were primarily names I bought via NameJet that were pushed to my Enom account, but there were also some hand registered domain names. Because the price of .com domain names is relatively cheap, I continued to renew them at Enom. In addition, a transfer would lock all of the names for 60 days, making them ineligible for the GoDaddy / Afternic Fast Transfer network during that period of time.