On of our website hosting servers contacted me today to say that one of the websites we host has gone down. This isn’t something we are used to, our server has kept all of our hosted websites and emails 100% live for 3 years so I did a little investigation.

A few minutes later and I found the problem, our website server was still working great (hoorah) but the domain name for the website is question had expired!

Ensuring your domain name is active and owned by you is extremely important, if your domain name lapses it could have a catastrophic affect on your company including

• Website goes down
• Emails go down
• Someone else buys your domain name

A call to our customer (I couldn’t email as their emails were also not working) helped them sort it out with little fuss, but this could have been much worse for them had our automated scripts not picked up the issue as it happened.

If you buy your own domain names, most registrars implement an automatic renewal system which I would strongly advise on utilising to avoid this happening to you.

Of course, all domain names that we purchase are set to automatically renew, we also send you an email a month prior to renewal to confirm that you want us to renew your domain name.

Don’t get caught out, keep your domain names up to date folks. If you don’t know where to start or need some help, contact us.