Domain Names Room

By Todd Schneckloth

I recently received a panicked phone call from a friend of one of my clients. They had just discovered that they had let their domain name expire and they didn't know their login information to renew it.

Then, to complicate it more, they could no longer get in contact with the person who set it up for them, and this person was also where all the email notifications where being sent. This meant they couldn't get any "forgot password" requests either.

As you might guess, this was not a good situation. And with them already 60 plus days past the renewal date, their domain was about to be released to the public.

How did this happen to them? Well it began with the fact that like most companies they rely on somebody else to maintain the technical aspects of their website. This is not a bad thing at all, but because of this they never had access to these settings and it wasn't something their technical contact felt the need to pass onto them.

What it boils down to is that these web settings are critical pieces of information to a persons business and most companies aren't even aware they exist. They get lost in web magic limbo.

To hopefully keep this from happening to you, I've compiled a small list of some settings you may wish to track down. This list is not exhaustive, but should cover most of the critical things.

What you should know:

• Who owns your domain name?
• Where is the domain registered?
• What is the member account URL, user name and password?
• What is the email address that receives the alerts for this domain and is it still valid?
• What is the domains renewal date?
• Who is the primary contact for your domain?
• Who is the technical contact for your domain?

Once you have this information you should request notification if any thing changes. Also if any of this information is no longer correct, now is the time to get it updated.

Finally I would recommend that you go through and test the settings to the website and email address. Once you are sure they all work, then put them some place safe. You may even want to consider reviewing these once a year and for sure any time you change vendors or some thing relating to this information.

And as a final note, unfortunately there was no happy ending with the previous vendor. They had let it get too far out of hand and they ended up losing the domain name and everything relating to it.

Todd Schneckloth is a commercial software developer specializing in online marketing. After many years of working with big business, his interests shifted towards helping individuals and small business owners become successful on the Internet.

His recent project http://dwkickstart.com is dedicated to providing marketing information and web skills to those trying to make it online.