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Is your website’s WHOIS current?

If you own a website, it is important to keep up the “whois” information up to date. WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query/response protocol that is widely used for querying databases in order to determine the registrant and information of a domain name. When setting up a new website, the domain registrant captures general information, such as name, address, phone numbers, and email addresses associated with the domain. Companies will often designate the domain registration process to any employee who appears to be “web savvy”. The employee may use his own personal information, which could lead to problems down the road. If the employee leaves the company, it may be a headache for his replacement to renew the domain upon expiration.

What can you do to prevent this problem? Take 5 minutes out of your day to create a file with all the important information regarding your domain. The file should contain not only contact info used to register the domain, but also the Customer ID number, passwords, and PIN numbers associated with the account. Make sure to include when the domain was purchased, last renewed and for how long. Do yourself a favor and create a “hard copy” of this file to prevent loss of information resulting from a computer crash.

When a domain is pending expiration, companies like GoDaddy will begin sending out emails, and notices in the mail to remind you to renew the domain as far out as 90 days prior to the expiration date. This is another reason it is important to keep your domain’s whois information up to date, so that you can receive these notices. What happens when your domain expires? Most companies will take your site down, and put up a holding page or sorts to let you know that the domain is “parked”. An embarrassing example of this could be seen last week when visiting Brunswick County’s Electric company, BEMC.org. See the image below of a BEMC.org’s expired website:

A worse case scenario is that your domain expires, the grace period is over, and someone purchases your domain out from under you. Your only option at this point is to try to buy your domain back, which usually comes at a ridiculous price. For example, The George W. Bush library website expired and a NC based web development company paid less than $10 for the www.georgewbushlibrary.com domain name – and sold it back for $35,000 to the library’s contracted Web developers, Yuma Solutions, who had accidentally let it expire. Don’t let this happen to you.

Do yourself a favor and make yourself the website information file mentioned above, and keep track of your website’s expiration date. You’ll thank us later!