Many people who run a business website overlook the importance of the domain name and its expiration date, and they only hear about it when the website is already down. Well, it is crucial to avoid domain name expiration because it could harm both your business and reputation significantly.

If you forget to renew your domain, you will stop receiving e-mails through your website; the website will simply be not there and replaced with ads. The best-case scenario is to lose the site but still be able to register it.

The most unpleasant part, however, is that someone else can take your domain and register it as their own. Imagine how many regular visitors you will lose if you have to register under a different name because someone else took it. If your website administrator doesn’t know the expiration date, he will have to run a lot of checks to identify the problem. At first, it is not always obvious what happened to the site. Thus, it’s going to take a while until the problem is identified and a lot more time to fix.

So, again, the domain name is probably the most critical part of your online presence. It is part of your brand. It is one of the easiest things to be good at online – protecting your domain name.

Here’s a short checklist of actions you can take to protect your online presence:

• Set up a domain name auto-renewal in your billing system on the expiration day. GoDaddy and a lot of other domain registrars offer this service.
• Register the domain name for years ahead. Dot Com domains can be registered for up to 10 years! This way, you will not be worried about having insufficient funds on the day of your auto-renewal because if the payment doesn’t go through, your domain will expire. The risk here is to remember for how long you have prepaid the domain for and when to renew it again.
• Always update your payment options in your account. If your card expires, your domain won’t be able to auto-renew.
• Ensure that you have an up-to-date e-mail address set up for your domain renewal because you usually receive notifications when the domain is close to expiration. Make sure you have access to it.
• If you hire a 3^rd party to develop your site, make sure they purchase the domain name to your company and have your contact details in the WHOIS records.

If you forget to pay for your domain and your website goes down, that does not ultimately mean that your business is gone. There is a grace period for each domain. You can still get it back if you are quick. One way to know if your domain is down for good is to employ our most basic $3.00/month ping service. If your domain goes down, you will know it within a few seconds.

And last, save your online business by simply watching out for your domain name because neither your services and products nor your web design would matter if your site is just not there.