I see my online mate Andrew Johnson gave me a mention on his Web Publishing Blog today. He referenced an interview I did with him where I spoke about a couple of sites, including a site where I review the best SEO book about. It’s at this site – www.seobookreview.com.
I clicked on the link to look at the site and saw this:
Damn. I’d forgotten/missed renewing the domain name and didn’t realise the site was down.
It will be back up shortly – I’ve just renewed the domain.
How To Avoid Your Web Site Being Down
There are 2 ways to avoid having a site go down for a long period of time (or at least so you know about it).
1. Make sure you keep your contact details up to date so the renewal notices get sent to the right place.
2. Use a service like Hyperspin that monitors your web site.
Cheers
Brendon
Cheers,
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Happy New Year!
Sound advice & I shall be sending a few people this info for sure.
I just had a frustrated customer complain when they had to pay $150.00 to get their domain out of a redemtion period, all through ignoring 3 emails that were sent .. probably marked the mail as spam & deleted!
Ack, I guess its good I made that post! I recently experienced the same, the registrar’s control panel said my domain was renewed and it really wasn’t — unfortunately for me I lost the domain, the site on it made $2000 or so a year.
I am checking out that hyperspin service now. In the past weeks I have launched some very expensive PPC campaigns and this could save me thousands of dollars if something goes down.
See you could do the reverse with hyperspin. If you wanted domain name x and someone had it registered and you monitor it, and lets say they forget to renew it, well theres your chance to grab it.
Just a thought.
This little ‘oops’ has happened to many of us. It’s also very common that the problem gets exacerbated by outdated emails, spam filters, etc.
I’m looking into hyperspin as well, sounds interesting … but here’s a thought on approaching it from a different direction. Sort of a ‘belt and suspenders’ approach.
How many have Outlook or a similar desktop PIM? When bying a domain, put a reminder in two years, four years or whatever in advance of the registration date. Free automatic reminder that can’t accidentally go to the spam bin.
Don’t have Outlook you say? Well go to Yahoo or Google (probably many others) who have a free calendar. It takes 1 minute tops to post the date your domain need renewal and set a reminder to pop up on the appropriate date. Surely our on-line businesses are worth that much effort?
@ Andrew: A good idea for finding expiring domains but against the terms of service of Hyperspin and against the “rules” of the Internet. Monitoring (hitting a server with continuous pings which is what “up time” services do is not allowed to be directed at servers you don’t own or control. It could be construed as a DoS (Denial of Service) attack and/or harassment, like continually making calls to a person’s phone number to see if they have paid their bill
However. there are plenty services that will do this for you, some for a fee and some free. See http://www.domaintools.com or http://www.godaddy.com for just a few suggestions.