Don’t Lose Your Domains!

Your domain name is the link between your customers and your business: don’t lose it!

You might think it’s hard to misplace something as ubiquitous as a domain name. It’s not like you can put it down somewhere and forget about it, right? Wrong. Your domain name is very real and a very important part of your online business, and without due care you could see it snapped up by someone else.

When you register a domain name you are effectively renting it. All the domains on the web are owned by registrars; when you register yours the lease is signed over to you for an agreed amount of time. Typically domain registrations last for one or two years, but you have the option to extend this period.

If your domain name is registered with UK2, we’ll send you a series of email notices when your time as a domain name owner is nearing its end. You have the opportunity to renew your domain names and continue using them as the gateway to your website, so these emails are important. When you receive a notice from us you are free to renew your domain name either by contacting our Billing department or through your CHI account.

So what happens when your domain name expires?

If you allow your domain name ownership to lapse you could face a range of problems. Without a domain name to point your customers towards your website you could lose out on revenue, customer loyalty and vital traffic. Your search engine ranking could go through the floor as potential site visitors are unable to reach your website through their browser bar. Website downtime could cost your business millions of pounds in revenue, so don’t let your site go offline because of something as simple as a forgotten domain name renewal.

If you heed email reminders from your registrar and renew your domains in plenty of time then you can continue with business as usual: your website will stay online and can be easily found. Unfortunately even some of the big names in business have fallen foul of domain name renewal…

Telecoms supergiant EE recently struck a nerve with their subscribers by forgetting to renew one of their domain names. FSNet.com, a domain name which some of EE’s longest serving customers use to access their email accounts, was left to expire, meaning thousands of their customers were unable to access their email. The web address is a legacy domain name which has been carried forward from Freeserve who over time became part of EE through several mutations. Although the company cited “technical difficulties” for the lapse in registration, it is clear to those in the know that someone forgot to renew the web address.

Do I have to ring up every time my domain name nears expiry?

If you – like that poor EE employee – are likely to forget to manually renew your domain name, you have the option to set your domains to auto renew. This means you’ll never face the embarrassment of plunging your customers into online darkness or losing important revenue and site visitors by having an inactive web address.

When you purchase a domain name through UK2.net we automatically set your domain names to auto renew, saving you time and effort. If you’re unsure about whether or not your domain names are safe from expiry you can find all you need to know through your CHI control panel. Simply log in and select the ‘Domains’ tab on the left hand side. If your domain names are set to auto renew this will be clearly stated beneath your listed web address; if they currently have a finite lifetime this will also be indicated in this section.

You can quickly and easily set your domain name to auto renew from within your CHI control panel. Simply select the domain name which you wish to modify from within the ‘Domains’ tab and you will be presented with all the information we have about the account. On the right hand side of your page here there will be a button which is set to ‘Manual Renew’. Clicking on this button will then give you option to set to ‘Auto Renew’.

Log into your CHI control panel to manage all of your UK2 services with ease. To register your very own domain name today visit our domain name registration page.