A few years ago I lost control of my website.

Hackers accessed my GoDaddy account and took control of my main domain name, which at the time was marriedbyjosh.com. The domain name is like the street sign and house number, pointing to the house, the house being my website hosting. So my website still existed but the domain name had been hacked. The long story made short on that is that GoDaddy isn’t to be trusted, but more importantly, my domain name matters.

Your domain name is how people

  1. Visit your website
  2. Email you
On top of that your domain name is a source of trust amongst humans, and equally amongst computers because it's how Google and other search engines know who you are.

Here’s a quick and easy to-do list for today.

  1. Figure out, or know, who your domain name registrar is. I know some people have "web guys", but I would encourage you to bring your domain name home to your own management. Its not hard, and it means you hold the keys to your car, not your favourite nerd.
  2. Once you know who your domain registrar is, know how to log on and manage your account.
  3. Now you're managing your account I need you to check five things:
    1. The contact email address is your correct email address
    2. The other contact details are correct
    3. That the domain is on auto-renew
    4. And the correct credit card details are entered
    5. That if you have two-step authentication available, you would turn it on, this means hackers need access not just to your username and password, but all your phone
Ideally that's enough to make sure your domain name is safe. But if you feel wise, go one step further: manually renew your domain for the longest period possible. It might be 10 years. At around $20 a year, $200 is good value for peace of mind in my books.

You might have noticed I bagged GoDaddy above, and I’ll do it again now, they were so helpful to the hackers who claimed to be me, and less than helpful to me who actually is me. I left them straight away, and I highly recommend everyone move all of their domain name registrations to Hover.com. They are a company I trust, the management interface is simple and clean, and unlike every other host they aren’t trying to upset me on everything else. They even have a really good human customer service side to it. You can email them and they’ll help you transfer your domains to them for free. I can’t recommend them enough. I recommend them is much that if you click the first Hover link that’s just a link to their front page, but if you use this link to sign up I get a $2 credit on my account https://hover.com/ICJkfriO.

Why is this important?

Here’s a list of the domain names that have expired or been deleted, I assume accidentally, in the Australian domain name space (domains that end in.au) since May. Many since have been re-purchased by other businesses, or by SEO spammers.

If you’re serious about your business, I’m guessing you want to stay off this list, because when your domain name is not renewed, aka it expires, you lose access to it, your email, your website, and your trust.

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Originally published on the Celebrant Institute: https://celebrant.institute/business/pro-tip-222-reasons-you-need-to-secure-your-domain-name-for-the-love-of-god-please-just-do-it/.