Recover an expired domain name

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Wed, Jul 01 2009 | 1 Comment

Have you ever been running your online business when all of a sudden your domain name went up for sale and you were unable to re-register it because you had forgotten or simply forgotten where you registered it?

Thousands of webmasters lose their domain names a year because of these reasons. They are able to not lose their domain names because of the 30 day redemption period that was put into place by ICANN. People who register domain names and run their businesses on them need to understand how important the name is and to keep it up to date with contact information. When your email address changes or you move, that information needs to be updated with the registrar.

How do you find out who your registrar is if you have forgotten? If you do a WHOIS inquiry, it will tell you everything the registrar knows about the domain including contact email, phone and fax numbers, and last known address. Luckily for the person needing to know where their domain is registered, the WHOIS inquiry also gives the name of the current registrar, DNS servers, and the creation and expiration dates of the domain name.

You can check your domain name through this website (Just replace yahoo.com with your domain name)

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=yahoo.com

There’s always more than one way to lose your domain. Sometimes hosting companies with less than a clean ethical record, other webmasters, and people who have an interest in your failure may be able to hold domain names in the name of a small business simply because the webmaster didn’t signup or re-register the domain when the time came.

You can avoid the situation or at least reduce your chances of losing your domain by registering it for 10 years, the maximum time allowed currently. In that time, make sure to extend it every year to the 10th year and always keep administrative email and physical addresses up to date through WHOIS.

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Beware of Phishing scams in your mailbox.

Tags: expiration dates, physical addresses, redemption period