News was made at the tail end of last year when, for one brief moment, a student bought google.com for $12. Sanmay Ved, who had previously worked for Google as an Account Strategist, was browsing the company tracker in September when he saw that the prestigious domain was up for grabs, but after making the purchase he immediately surrendered the domain for $6,006.13 (or the numerical version of Google for our eagle eyed readers) which was donated to the Art Of Living India Foundation at the request of Mr Ved.
While this is nothing in regards to some of the biggest domain sales in history, it does reiterate the importance of keeping an eye on your domain listings and their expiration dates – at the end of the day, it is the link that connects you and your customers and it is essential you don’t lose your domain. If you put yourself in the position of someone else being able to buy your brand itcould result in you effectively losing your footing online.
[tweetthis]at the end of the day, your #domain is the link that #connects you and your customers[/tweetthis]
As frightening as this is, it only brushes the surface of potential issues if you lose your domain. With a lost domain comes the surrender of years of brand building and customer relationships, loss in revenue and traffic to your website, and the potential for your search engine ranking to plummet.
What Happens If You Lose Your Domain?
If your domain expires, it will be effectively ‘switched off’ so that anyone visiting your URL will receive either a generic error message or will be sent to a ‘for sale’ page. It’s important to remember that there is no grace period for renewal and once its expired its expired and is out there for others to snap up if they’re quick enough.
If this happens there isn’t a lot you can do and the only course of action is proving that the new owner is squatting on the domain to try and get money out of you – in the year 2000, Kodak won the rights to kodak.ru after more than a year of legal wrangling and 20 lawsuits due to this. Needless to say, this takes time, money, and legal proceedings and will only drag on any damage being done to your brand.
[tweetthis]it’s important to remember that there is no grace period for renewal of your #domain – once its expired its expired[/tweetthis]
When registering a domain with Host Geek, we will regularly remind you via email that your domain is up for renewal allowing you to continue on with your business trouble-free. Even then, we give the option for annual auto-renew meaning you’ll never have the burden of renewal hanging over your head again saving you the time, worry and effort.
