Do you automatically renew your domain name? Some providers still don’t do this for you by default, they wait for you to confirm it. As a general rule, if we can (and payment is forthcoming) we renew all our domains automatically. Yes, we may renew a few every year that the customer doesn’t but this is definitely preferred to leaving a name to expire.
This is why we were interested to read today about the domain halfords.com, yes that’s right, the huge brand name Halfords. They forgot to renew their domain, due an “administrative error”. When you’re a small business it can be pretty inconvenient, but a household name like that? I’m sure with a website that size being down for a considerable amount of time must cost them a fair bit in lost sales.
So, the moral of the story.. make sure your domains are renewed! With com, net and org domains (and some others) you can renew them for up to 10 years, just to be on the safe side!
We found the story here if you want to read it in full: www.theregister.co.uk