noob mistakes

I nearly lost Noobpreneur.com domain name due to my ignorance in… renewing it! Lessons well-learned, and if you DON’T want to lose your web assets, you should read this article and learn from my mistake.

If you happen to visit Noobpreneur.com on March 12, 2010 and saw a generic page, welcome – you have visited our domain parking page. This occurs if you forget to renew your domain names and/or want to let yours go to past the expiry dates.

Expired domains are ‘returned’ to the domain registrar before they are finally being deleted and made available for re-registration. And believe me, getting past the domain name’s expiry date is the least thing you want to happen for your sites – When a domain name expires – especially if it’s a high quality one, people will battle to ‘grab’ the domain name (have rights to the domain name.)

My mistake is that I am being ignorant and forget to update my domain name contact info email address. If a domain name is about to expire, you will usually receive notifications from your domain registrar. I didn’t receive the notifications because… they were sent to a dead email address!

Ouch.

To cut long story short, I am fortunate to renewed Noobpreneur.com before somebody else do. Lessons well-learned.

Here are some tips to avoid what I have been through:

1. If you change address and/or any contact info, update your domain name information, so just in case your registrar want to contact you, you can be reached easily. Make this a habit.
2. Whenever possible, renew your domain name to a longer period of time. Today you can register or renew your domain name to the period of 1-10 years.
3. If your domain registrar offers an option to auto-renew your domain name, you should take that option to avoid losing your domain name.
4. Lock your domain name to avoid auto-registration-on-expiry by domain grabbers.
5. If you own multiple domain names registered with multiple domain registrars, consider to consolidate it into one account, and make sure you choose the most credible domain registrar (I was also about to lose a domain name because the domain registrar was going out of business – I have to contact ICANN, the non-profit domain registrar accreditation organisation)

I hope this article helps you to avoid losing your web assets.

Ivan Widjaya
A lucky noob
Image by goopymart.

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