Expiring Domains: every company’s nightmare

This year, millions of people’s domains will expire. If they are well-informed enough to have a renewal agreement with whomever they registered with, they’ll be fine, but there will undoubtedly be some who will fall through the gap.

For companies who conduct most of their business online, forgetting to renew your registration can be disastrous. Not only does the website drop out, but so do your emails. This however, is only half the problem.

Domains become innately more valuable to a company as time progresses. SEO rankings, customer relations, branding and marketing are all inextricably linked to a company’s domain. The larger and more successful a company is, the more value is placed on their domain.

Back in the day... when the internet was young, some businesses who came late to the online market, found that other people had already registered their company domain names. This lead to back-room deals being struck and heralded the beginning of domain investment and blackmailing.

Some individuals found that buying a large company’s domain at market price and then threatening to use it for nefarious or dodgy purposes was enough to see those companies hand over large amounts of cash in return for ownership. However as time progressed and most of the .com domains became registered, saturating the market, those blackmailers found that their livelihoods were drying up. So they resorted to hijacking domains during the period between their expiry and re-registration.

This is the point at which some fairly large companies have fallen victim to these practices.

So, remember, set up renewal agreements with your registrar. If your company domain is expiring within the next 12 months, get started now. Don’t wait about.