Imagine you have had your domain name for 5 years. You have handed out thousands of business cards containing your email and website address, your letterheads, invoices, compliments slips have the same data, you even have your domain painted on your vans or trucks. Email marketing is your main way of finding prospects and you receive most of your enquiries by emial or from forms on your website. You have even started to make sales and receive payments on the net.
Then one day you come into work and you've no email and your website is down. Bit of a nuisance! Then you discover that your domain name now belongs to someone else and the impact begins to sink in. But surely this can't happen? It can't be that hard to sort out can it? There must be laws stopping this?
At best you will be without mail and website for several weeks, you will probably have to pay out thousands of pounds either in legal fees or in "ransom" money and at worst you will never get the name back and have to start building from scratch, all over again.
So how does this happen and what do you do about it? Here are a couple of non-extreme examples of what can happen.
A musician I know had a website selling his cd's, announcing tour dates, offering merchandise to his fan base, all doing him a lot of good. One day he noticed his email had stopped and his website had been replaced by a single page announcing "This domain is for sale - click here for more detail". To cut a long story short his domain registration had expired without his realising it, literally a few minutes after it had expired an automated monitoring system had notified the "scam" artists who look for such events, they re-registered it in their name and offered it back to him for $5000. Despite huge reluctance he paid it, he really had no choice.
Had it been a .co.uk domain he could probably have got it back within 3 weeks using Nominet's dispute system but as it was a .com he had no real recourse. He had gone for the cheapest domain registration system available so the standard of communication was poor so he wasn't adequately warned that his domain was close to expiry. By the way by going the cheap route here he saved himself maybe £2 a year!
Another company I know had a shock when their hosting provider went bust and the service ceased leaving them without email or website. No big problem, we could get them on our servers in a few hours. Except that the person who, several years back, had registered their domain name for them had in fact registered it in his own name so only he could authorise moving the site from the dead servers to our live ones. They had lost track of him so could not make contact. As their name was a .co.uk we were able to get the name back and all is now fine. But they were without service for about 3 weeks while it was resolved. Had there name been a .com it is unlikely they would ever have got it back.
The first thing to do is to see if you have a problem, before it hits you. Go to a reputable domain registrar's site, I'd recommend ours - http://www.kwikreg.co.uk
Use the search box to search for your domain. It will tell you it is already registered and there is a link to "Owner Info". Click on that and make sure it is your details that appear. Also check when the domain expires and make a note of that date so you don't get caught out like the musician mentioned above.
If there is any problem deal with it now! Don't leave it until it really matters, like when you want to move servers or maybe even sell the business.
If you need help or advice just ask. It won't cost you anything. Just post a comment or email me: tony@netsecrets.co.uk
