Renewing your domain and hosting late often comes with some dangers or better put, disadvantages which many people may not know exist.
At Nihtem Solutions, we have dealt with a lot of difficult situations, where clients have not renewed their domains early enough. We do send out notices via e-mail, before a domain eventually expires but for varying reasons, some still fail to renew their domain name(s) on time.
Before we discuss the reasons why we always warn you against late renewal of your domain and web hosting space, let us quickly get to understand the various phases of a website’s lifespan.
Creation date is the date the website was first registered. Though every website is expected to be renewed yearly; it is advisable to renew at least one week before the actual expiration date. Doing it even much earlier also doesn’t hurt – it is just being safe. The processes involved in renewal can actually stretch for as long as 5 to 6 days so your web administrator may advise at least a week before expiration.
After Expiry: Once a domain expires, an automatic process is triggered which helps mark the domain as expired and simultaneously pauses all services attached to that domain/website such as SSL, email, website content display etc. Your website become inaccessible to everyone including you.
This also immediately causes various predictable issues like the search engines (like Google) wondering where your website has disappeared into. The way the search engine reasons is that if you are truly an authority in your field of business, you will be constantly waiting there in the world wide web. It therefore removes your ranking and wait till you are back with the penalty of losing your search engine reputation.
Another issue is that all emails sent to your emails are thrown back to the sender. Look at the scenario this way. The engine in charge of mail delivery is like a mailman sent to deliver mails to an address which doesn’t exist. You know what happens thereafter.
However during this expiry period (usually 30 days depending on the domain and extension), a client can still renew the website before if enters a period call REDEMPTION.
In a case where the domain enters REDEMPTION PERIOD, the domain name cannot be renewed through the normal means and is typically expensive to redeem. In addition to the high expense, redeeming a domain takes a few days.
Things can still get even worse. A worst case scenario is where a domain is deleted from the registry and taken-up by someone else. Domains are typically deleted from their registry after the redemption period if the owner fails to redeem them. Once deleted, they become available once again, to the fastest taker who are usually domain auctioning firms. These online domain auctioneers seek to hold your domain and resell later at an higher price to you or anybody else interested to buy. They make immediate money by placing pay per click advert on your domain and leeching on your customers who goes to your expired website.
In a nutshell, it helps to renew your domain name on time, to avoid the embarrassment, higher cost or outright loss of a domain name you might have invested in over the years.
Your website is also your office on the world wide web and it deserves every attention it can get. Now that the entire world is online, you don’t want to loss out!