Domain Maintenance

TLDR

• Review the current state of your domain.
• Review your contact info quarterly.
• Renew your domain annually. Save your receipts.
• Do not rely on auto-renew.
• Read about abuse and consider setting up RFC 2142 email addresses.
• Try to monitor the fee class of your domain.

Overview

This page contains tips that can help to ensure you do not unintentionally lose access to your domain. Do not consider it to be a comprehensive checklist and always follow the advice / instructions given by your registrar.

Current State

If you have previously registered a domain, or had someone register a domain on your behalf, it is important to be aware of, understand, and document the following:

• Who is listed as the registrant of the domain?
• Which registrar was used to register the domain? Do you have access to that account?
• When does the domain’s registration expire?
• Who is responsible for renewing the domain?

In addition to the domain specific information listed above, it can be useful to document the providers for common services used with the domain:

• Where is DNS for the domain hosted?
• Where is email for the domain hosted?
• Where is the website for the domain hosted?

Review Quarterly

Put this on your calendar and set a notification to remind you.

• Log in to your registrar account.
• Check to ensure all domain contacts are up-to-date.
• Log in to the email account(s) you have used for domain contacts.
• Verify you have access to all email accounts or phone numbers that have been used as account recovery options. If you have lost access to any of these, make sure they get replaced.

Renew Annually

Put this on your calendar and set a notification to remind you.

If you followed the advice given in the registration section, your domain will be registered for 3-8 years. Renewing annually helps to form a good habit and ensures you never end up in a situation where your domain is expiring and something has gone wrong.

Always save your receipts when you renew your domain.

Auto-Renew

Do not rely on auto-renew to renew your domain with the assumption no extra attention is required. There are two common situations where auto-renew is less than ideal.

1. If the credit card used for auto-renew payments expires or gets cancelled, auto-renew will fail.
2. Auto-renewal usually happens too close to a domain’s expiration date to allow a reasonable amount of time to deal with any unexpected edge cases that may cause the renewal to fail.

If you follow the recommendation to keep a domain renewed for 3-8 years into the future, auto-renew will not be an option anyway.

Abuse & Handling

Avoid abuse to ensure domains and / or registrar accounts don’t get suspended. More information can be found in the abuse section. It is advisable to maintain the RFC 2142 email addresses that are listed there.