Ticking Timebomb, Where is Your.Domain.com.au ?

It’s something you rarely think about.  Perhaps occasionally you receive a bill asking you to renew your domain
name but other than that it just works – at least it should.

Your domain name is your company’s brand.  It drives your email, your website and is often linked to
security certificates particularly if you process payments online or offer your team mates access to work from home.

But who hosts your .com.au domain?
Over the past several years numerous online company’s have come and gone offering low cost online registration of domain names.  Sometimes the price differential seems too good to be true with fluctuations from $10 with one provider and $200 with another.  What’s the difference?

Well, like most IT services – the difference between a cheap provider and a mroe expensive one is generally discovered when something goes wrong.  Domains are the gateway to your organisations core services and if your email or website suddenly stops working you’re going to want instant answers to the problem.

This is the core difference between a managed domain versus a low cost “cheap and easy” domain registration.  Many of the low cost ones (even those who advertise here in Australia) are based offshore and don’t generally have the type of helpdesk offering that you might expect – particularly when your email is down and you’ve just lost half a day’s productivity.

I won’t go into all of the options out there for domain hosting but here’s 3 quick tips:

1. Organise an audit of your domain names. Write down all of your domain names.  Remember, you might be using just one for your @companyname email address.  But you might also have others you have registered for branding purposes (after all.. they were only $10 so why not).  Talk to anyone in your organisation who may have registered domains as part of their role as well.  Those domain names may be linked to some of the aforementioned core services.  Round them all up and send them off to your IT managers – hopefully that’s us.  All domain names should be documented – who hosts them, when do they expire, what services are they being used for, what are the passwords to access the domain configuration?

2. Consider a premium hosting service for critical domain names. Anything that pertains to email, web, ecommerce, Sharepoint, VPN or remote desktop access ought to be hosted with a premium service.  Depending on the need, we use different ones.  Sometimes your Internet provider is appropriate so long as they are a premium service themselves.  We get it – sometimes you order a domain name because you really like it.  MyGreatNewProductIdea.com.au hasn’t been registered yet and hey, this could be the next Google.  We also get that when you’re buying up domain real estate you don’t want to drop $200 on every little idea you have.  Buy cheap if you have to – but once your idea becomes a reality, convert to a serious premium provider.

3. Renew early. The number one “huh?” outage that we see every day is when a domain name has expired and the renewal notice has been sent to the wrong person inadvertently meaning your company isn’t notified of the expiry  (usually this eamil has been going to a former employee or an IT company who has since moved on).   To ensure you don’t have to suffer through an expired domain name and the risk that somebody else will register your domain name it’s prudent to re-register domain names earlier than their expiry or drop dead date.

Why is this a “huh?” outage?  Well, after a domain name expires it’s often the case that much time is wasted looking at the symptom such as the email system being down instead of the domain.  Once the real culprit has been established there is often hours of critical time spent searching for who hosts the domain.
There is a lot of huh? – coupled with a lot of headscratching going on during this time while your business suffers without email and web.  To add insult to injury, setting up a domain again can take anywhere from 24-48 hours to “synch” with the Internet meaning you could theoretically suffer downtime for an extensive period all because you weren’t notified about the expiration.

Your domain name(s) are a single point of failure in your business.  A good domain strategy at a slightly higher cost can literally save you thousands of dollars in downtime.