Your domain name is the most important asset your online blog business will possess. Everything flows downwards from your domain name: hosting, email, search ranking, traffic, reputation, and of course your brand. If you lose control of the domain name you will have an extremely difficult time of things, so it's best to be careful about how you register and manage your domain name. Here are some important considerations to make:
The most important advice is to register and manage the domain name yourself. Domain management isn't too hard and it really is the key to your business. Here are some tips on registering:
Set up an account with a domain registrar yourself and buy the domain name(s) you want. Sometimes this job is given to a web designer or developer who has been contracted. This is not a good idea as they may move on and you may not think about it until months or years down the track when you'll wish you'd done it yourself.
Make sure to set the account in your own name/your business name. Make sure that if there are multiple levels of user accounts, and you need to give access to someone else, that you keep yourself as the primary contact. If you don't have multi-level access, and you let someone else in, be sure to update your login details afterwards.
Consider not giving domain access to anyone, instead doing any domain work yourself – under direction if necessary. Register your primary domain name for at least 2 years. Search engines give domain registration periods weight in determining how they rank your site. A lengthier registration period shows you aren't conducting a spam operation.
Make sure you set your domain to "auto-renew" for when the registration expires, or at least make sure you will get plenty of notification emails so you don't inadvertently forget to renew.
There have been a couple of high profile stuff-ups with companies forgetting to renew and either losing their domain names, or having to pay big sums to get them back. Moreover, there is a cottage industry around watching domains as they expire to see if a bargain can be nabbed.
Although you can register a domain name with a domain registrar like NameCheap or MyDomain, often you can also have your web hosting company register it, and sometimes they will bundle this together in a package. Although you can always move a domain name, it's generally better practice to use a specialized domain registrar and then just point the domain to whatever hosting provider you are currently using as you may change providers periodically.
If companies other than the one you registered your domain with write to you in email or regular mail, ignore them! Predatory companies will sometimes send letters close to a domain expiration to try to get a renewal to go through them.
Transferring domain names is relatively easy. You first need to check that the domain is unlocked. If you are buying a domain name, make sure the seller has unlocked it. If you are selling, look through your domain registrar's control panel.
Most registrars will then allow the domain recipient to make a transfer request and they'll do the work. There will be an email sent to the domain owner to make sure they have consented to the transfer and then the process is generally quite smooth. Sometimes you will need an Authorization (AUTH) code from the original registrar to give to the recipient registrar. If you run into any problems, just contact your registrar's support.
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02142011
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