I was speaking to a colleague a while back about a meeting she had with a prospective client. The client’s business partnership had fallen apart and they had gone separate ways but in the same industry. She then went  and spent almost $50,000 on her marketing campaign including annually published directories. Unfortunately for this person her hosting company hadn’t advised that her domain name was ready for renewal and her ex business partner had quickly bought it when it had become available.

Missing this renewal has been a costly exercise ….loss of a successful domain name, rankings and client base, loss of advertising expenditure and also the whole marketing campaign had highlighted her website and was now owned by her competition.

It is so easy to overlook such a simple thing as a domain name renewal but missing the re-registration can have some very bad consequences that might not be realised until it is too late. Always make sure you keep your own reminder of when these renewals are due.

Most hosting company’s have excellent procedures in place to prevent this happening but obviously, as in this instance, there can be costly mistakes made. The hosting company accepted no responsibility and didn’t think her loss was anything to worry about as she also had her phone number in all the advertising. Hmmmm…