Introduction
How much of your business dealings are done via email or rely upon your website? For so many small businesses, their website and their email accounts are a crucial part of the lead generation and day-to-day operations.
The one major element that allows your website to work and your emails to flow is your domain. For us, we have upwatch.co.uk. You can find our website at that address and you can email us at hello@upwatch.co.uk and we can email you back.
What would happen, though, if you forgot to renew that domain and suddenly there was no website and no emails could come in or out? Let's explore a real-life case study where I have seen the impact of this.
Sarah's story: A cautionary tale
Sarah is the owner of a beauty salon and training academy in Devon. She built a strong reputation with customers and clients around her knowledge and skills.
She reached out to me to help build her a new website and to set up a professional email address using her domain name. Both were established and worked well for many months.
Suddenly one morning, Sarah emailed me from her Gmail account. She reported that her email account wasn't working. When I checked, her website was also unavailable.
I could see no reason from the hosting as to why the website and email account were unavailable, but I was quick to note one key thing. If the website and email account were down, it was either an issue with the DNS records or the domain. After a quick analysis, I could see that the domain had been due to expire in the last week.
When I contacted Sarah and explained that her domain had expired and had not been renewed. Sarah was a bit surprised. She had seen emails about her domain being due to renew or expire but had assumed my web agency would be handling that.
As the domain had been purchased by Sarah years before I began working with her, I had no way of renewing her domain. Plus, it is never a good idea to let an agency buy and renew your domain for your business. You should always retain full ownership of your domain.
After a quick explanation, Sarah realised it was in her hands to pay for the domain every year and she needed to quickly make that payment.
Not long after paying for another year, the website and email accounts were back up. One question from Sarah remained, though, what about emails that were sent to her during the downtime?
The risk of domain expiration
Letting a domain expire and not to manually or automatically renew it comes with some significant risks.
Firstly, to answer Sarah's question, if anyone had sent her an email during that downtime, the email would've bounced. There is no way to recover emails that never reached your account. If important financial emails had been sent, or bookings submitted from external platforms, that data was lost.
Alongside the loss of emails, the website was down. Any potential bookings or enquiries would've been lost. Reputational damage as well could also occur.
Another big risk is that if the domain is left without an owner for too long, it becomes available for someone else to purchase. Every year, around 29% of domains that have expired that year are purchased by someone else. This can be for genuine reasons or it could be to co-opt an established business.
How to prevent domain expiration
Most domain registrars offer an option to turn on auto-renewals. You can press a toggle and then every year, or whenever the domain renews, it will happen automatically. Or at least it should do.
Setting up automatic renewals is a good start, but is not the perfect solution. A lot of automatic renewals are tied to a credit or debit card. If your card expires or is cancelled, a future payment cannot be completed.
I have personally had a few occasions where a domain registrar has emailed me because they have tried to renew a domain and failed. The payment card they have on file has expired. I have come close to losing a domain this way!
Turning on auto-renewals is a great start. It does need a safety net, though. That comes from domain expiration monitoring. With this monitoring in place, you can be informed 7-30 days before a domain is due to expire.
You can be proactive and make sure the payment is manually completed. If not, at least you have a safety net to warn you if the auto-renewal hasn't happened and the expiration is imminent.
How UpWatch can help
Our domain expiration monitoring is just one of the seven website monitors we provide to every business that signs up.
If you do not want to end up losing your website and email address so suddenly, sign up today for one of our comprehensive website monitoring plans.
