If you forget to pay your yearly fees for your domain name registration, you can lose the rights to it.
TRUE STORY: one of my clients let his domain name lapse, and he couldn’t buy the rights back because the domain name to his own website was auctioned off behind his back in the space of 48 hours.
Believe it or not, there are forces out there waiting for domain names to lapse so that they can snatch up the rights quickly and then sell you back the rights to your own domain name at an enormous markup. Why? Because they can (and they know how valuable your existing domain name is to you).
Making this mistake is far easier than it might seem. Here’s how it happens: The website owner changes their contact email address, but fails to update this information with their website registrar. The client stops checking this old email address (they’ve forgotten it exists); so, when the registrar sends notice to the client to renew their domain name registration, the owner doesn’t receive the email notices. Then, bang! One day the owner tries to access the website, and it is gone. It’s like being locked out of your own house.
Another way to have this nightmare happen to you is to forget to renew the expiration date on the credit card that you have on file with the domain name registrar.
Remember: you can always change hosts, but you can’t replace a domain name that you have lost — and if your domain name is gone, so is all the equity you’ve built up in your website presence.
It really can happen to you. So, if you are the owner of a website, make sure you know when the rights to your domain name are set to expire; and make sure you keep your contact information and credit card information current with your domain name registrar.
