Even though it might not seem like it, being a website owner can be really annoying at times. There are hundreds of important things that you need to look out for and if you don’t, you or your company will have to pay the consequences. Ask anyone who is in charge of managing websites and they will tell you that hands down, the most annoying that can happen is for the domain name to expire.
For those who are unfamiliar with this, websites need to keep renewing their web address regularly and in case they don’t, the website and email address will stop working. As crazy as this might sound, lots of big-time companies including Microsoft have forgot to renew their domain and to some, this caused millions of dollars in damages.
The Craziest Domain Expirations
Today we are going to show you the top three craziest domain expirations that you will never believe actually happened. The companies that forgot to renew their domain had to pay lots of money and go through considerable embarrassment. This will show you just how important it is to use the right website monitoring tools.
#1 Microsoft
The first company who forgot to renew its domain is none other than Microsoft. This happened back in 1999 when Microsoft forgot to renew the web addresses for “Hotmail” and “Passport”. Users literelly couldn’t log into their accounts or send emails. Not good for a tech company providing email services.
#2 Dallas Cowboys
Dallas Cowboys is one of the most popular US NFL teams and back in 2010 the team also forgot to renew its domain. Per default, their domain registrar moved automatically and updated the website to feature a picture of two people playing soccer and some ads.
#3 Yatra
Yatra is the last one on our list because this company lost thousands of customers after forgetting to renew its domain back in 2012. This Indian tourist company also lots most of its partners because it couldn’t provide them with an official website address.
But auto renew will protect me?
In theory it should, but what if you have the wrong credit card, or if it expired? What if you have an old email address in your whois, and the expiration notification never reaches you? It’s always good to be on a lookout, and have third party tools check in.
With the new trend of SSL importance due to search engine optimization (Google confirmed SSL certificate on a website is a positive ranking signal). Same with domain name expiration, this same issue occurs when an SSL certificate expires. Not to mention, everybody is already watching their website uptime. And by now we begin to understand why this article started with “being a website owner can be really annoying at times”.
