I’ve witnessed several first hand instances where domain owners accidentally fall asleep at the wheel and fail to renew their domains. That is, falling asleep on domains & websites they actively use and update.
My heart always goes out to them cause it’d be a terribly painful experience for me to lose a domain I own and manage.
In most of these cases, the previous domain owner fails to receive a renewal notice from their registrar (either because they didn’t update their email address, or the email itself got tossed into some bulk spam folder). After that, they simply forget. When it does expire, some owners rescue them during the grace period, but have to pay extra. But imagine if they went out of town during that period, or got slammed at their 9-5, and failed to check the site out for a while..
I can personally say this… I get queasy when *any* of my domain registration periods fall under a 12 month time frame. In my opinion, it doesn’t make much sense to not register a domain you’re passionate about for less than 3 years. Why not, you know? 3 years will set you back $30 bucks (basically). And why trust auto-renew to determine the fate of your domain each year… I’d rather be the one physically extending or canceling a domain registration.
So I decided to do an audit. An audit on what? On a few seo/sem/ppc/domaining websites I visit regularly through my RSS feed. I wanted to know how long some of these folks had registered their domains, and how close they were to their expiration dates.
A majority I researched (through DomainTools) were fine, and had registration dates for more than 3 years (ie. SEO Book, Tropical SEO, DomainTools, DomainNameWire). I did uncover a few, though, with less than 12 month left on their registration - even some that are about 5 months away..oye. I’m not doing this to “call someone out”, I just wanted to provide a friendly reminder. They’re probably well aware that their domains needs to be renewed, but who knows. Anybody can lose a domain, and I’d rather not have it happen to the fine bloggers on this list:
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dailydomainer.com — expires on 10/17/2007
domainnamenews.com — expires on 10/27/2007
seroundtable.com — expires on 12/4/2007
conceptualist.com — expires on 12/18/2007
tony-hill.net — expires on 12/22/2007
webguerrilla.com — expires on 12/28/2007
pronetadvertising.com — expires on 1/30/2008
stundubl.com — expires on 3/9/2008
scoreboard-media.com — expires on 4/27/2008
mikeindustries.com — expires on 5/6/2008
searchenginejournal.com — expires on 6/11/2008
wolf-howl.com — expires on 6/19/2008
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think I got those dates right..let me know if I messed any up..
and on that note, I need to extend domainersgazette.com for an additional few years, just to be on the safe side…
This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Domaining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Don’t worry, I am set to auto renew.
He he he, don’t fret about those other sites. I’m sure they’re on top of it, but it’s still kind of you to let them know.
I make sure that all the domains that I care about are registered for at least 5 years.
My SEO tool of choice (http://www.websitegrader.com) deducts points for domains that are to expire within the year as there is some suspicion that Google penalizes for this in a minor way in the rankings.
Good lookin’ out! I have it on autorenew but I should go to a longer term on that renewal.
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