Your Domain Is Your Name Tag. Do Not Lose It.

What It Costs

A domain is roughly twenty to forty dollars a year. Against every other line on your bill it is nothing.

It is also your name online. Everything points at it. Your email, your listings, your printed material, every link anyone has ever shared, and years of accumulated search credibility all sit on top of that one string.

What Happens If It Lapses

If you do not renew, you may not get it back. Not as a scare tactic, as a fact.

Expired domains get bought quickly, sometimes automatically by services that exist purely to catch them. When that happens your options are paying whatever the new owner asks, which is usually far more than forty dollars, or changing your business address on the internet and starting your reputation over.

This is the one line item where the cheap option and the safe option are the same option. Never let it lapse to save money.

Who Holds It

Second thing, and the one that catches people. Find out whose name your domain is actually registered in.

It is common for a developer, agency, or a friend who helped out years ago to have registered it on their own account. Usually with no bad intent at all. It becomes a problem the day you want to move, or that person stops answering email, or the relationship ends badly.

You should be the registrant, on an account you control, with the billing card and the recovery email being yours. Anyone who resists that arrangement is telling you something useful about how they do business.

Worth Paying For

• The domain itself, every year, on auto renew, with a card that will not expire.
• Registrar lock, which is usually free and stops it being transferred out from under you.
• Whois privacy, which is often free now and cuts down the spam calls enormously.
• Hosting, which is a genuine ongoing cost for a genuine ongoing service.

Usually Not

• Extra domain extensions bought defensively. One or two at most, and only if someone is genuinely likely to take them.
• Security add ons sold at checkout that duplicate what your host already provides. Ask what it does that you do not already have.
• Any product on your bill that nobody at your company has ever opened.

Knowing exactly what is worth paying for is most of this job. The domain is worth paying for. Go and check right now whose name it is in, and when it renews.