Help! My Domain Name Is About To Expire!
While in principle a website could be yours forever, a single payment does not guarantee this. Because companies are constantly rebranding and going out of business, existing domain names often become irrelevant or superfluous. And given the huge international demand for new domain names, it would be unfair if a web address was permanently off-limits once it was registered. Indeed, cybersquatting was one of the main priorities assigned to ICANN, the internet regulator founded in 1998 to manage domain names worldwide.
As a consequence of this, domain names are acquired for a fixed period of time. This is typically one year – enough time to get a new business established and begin improving domain authority. If the parent company has limited first-year turnover, it doesn’t have to spend a fortune on a lifelong commitment. And if it goes out of business, the domain will eventually be freed up for someone else to use. More importantly, this annual renewals process means that related domains can be added. These might include registering the .co version of an existing .com account, before redirecting traffic from the.co portal to the.com site.
Points of authority
However, the prospect of an expired domain can be worrying. For one thing, SEO benefits quickly evaporate if Google and Bing’s web crawlers discover that a site is offline. For another, customers presented with an error message will simply move onto competitor brands, potentially being lost forever. Many firms are online only, so even a temporary outage might cost them valuable trade. And while it’s possible to retrieve an expired domain name up to 75 days after its renewal date, ICANN may levy late penalty fees. Damage to SEO rankings is almost inevitable, too.
Automatic for the people
Fortunately, expired domains don’t have to be an issue if you’ve chosen Midphase as your hosting partner. We encourage the automatic renewal of new domains for simplicity and peace of mind, though auto-renewal may be turned off at any time through each customer’s CHI accounts. Renewal options are listed under the Account tab, with three main options:
Auto Renew.
The simplest way to ensure expired domains don’t burden your to-do list, with payment automatically taken using card details stored securely on our server.
Manual Renew.
Giving you complete control over payment methods, renewal dates and the ability to let a domain lapse if it’s no longer required.
Expire.
If your domain is no longer needed, this releases it back onto general sale for other people to purchase.
Information stored on your CHI portal includes each registered domain’s scheduled expiry date. Hovering your mouse over this box will reveal the exact date of expiry. If you want to manually renew existing services, choose the relevant account (or check the boxes beside more than one for multiple renewals) and select Renew Now. Within a few mouse clicks, each selected website will remain online for another twelve months.
It’s good housekeeping to periodically ensure your contact details and financial data are up to date in your CHI portal. If you paid by credit card, we can’t automatically renew a domain if the card has expired or been reissued with a new CVV code. Equally, ensure the email address linked to your Midphase account is still active, and remember to add us to your whitelist of trusted senders. We communicate with our customers by email, so it’s crucial these messages don’t get mistakenly labeled as Junk or Spam. As a backup to email, we also send SMS renewal messages to your cell, though you can turn these notifications off in the Account section of CHI.