Luck Trumps Oversite

I have you ever wondered why similar posts appear on different blogs at almost the same time. In this case it is because of Brendon Sinclair'seditorial in Sitepoint's Tribune newsletter. In the editorial he describes how a client lost her domain name registration. Which got me thinking of one of our client's brush with domain name expiration.

Fortunately, she got lucky.

It started when the client decided to protect her brand name by registering the .ca version of their domain name. (A really good idea.) We don't do domain name registration - so she decided to do it herself.

And, that is were she got lucky.

The company she chose to register the domain name talked her into transferring the registration of the main site to them. However, due to an error in the "whois" database, they were unable to complete the transfer. The email name in the database was incorrect so the client asked us to fix it. Which is when we found the domain name registration was about to expire.

If the client hadn't decided to register the new domain name or if the company hadn't talked her into moving from their present registration service, the site would have gone down.

While we do offer website maintenance, checking registration dates was not something we normally did for clients. And, we still don't list it as one of our services. However, we now routinely check expiry dates for new clients.

This is something every website owner should do. All you need to do is enter your domain name into "Whois" service such as www.whois.sc/. Check that the contact information is up to date and check the expiry date.

You might not be as lucky as our client.