Are you Truly the Master of your Domain?

A few recent incidents have made me realize that most of us have a false sense of security when it comes to the Internet domains that we have registered.

First, people who have domains registered at Registerfly.com have experienced difficulties lately in renewing their domains. Many valuable domains have been lost because of this. These problems had become so numerous and the complaints so loud that Enom has dropped Registerfly as a reseller.

Second, I discovered last week that I could not access any of my domains that used Enom’s DNS. After some investigation I discovered that for some reason Comcast Internet subscribers were not able to see domains using Enom’s DNS. I would never have noticed if I had not been a Comcast subscriber myself. Considering that Comcast is the second largest ISP with over 11 million subscribers - that was a large section of the population cut off from my domains for about six hours.

Because of this I have formulated the following rules to protect our domains.

1. Multiyear registrations – For domains that are important to you, never put yourself in the position of sweating out a renewal. At 10 dollars or less per year the cost is negligible, so always be paid up several years ahead. This way if your registrar merges or runs into financial or legal trouble you are protected. Also, it can help with the search engines as a multiyear registration is a sign of quality and that your website will be around for a while.
   
2. Bullet Proof WHOIS information – Your WHOIS information can be a time bomb waiting to go off.
   
• Don’t use private registration – I hate getting spam emails as much as anyone, but private registration is asking for trouble. Under ICANN rules the registrar or "private registration" company is the legal owner of the domain! Private registration can also hurt you with the search engines.
  
• Register-Lock setting – Always have your valuable domains locked so that they cannot be transferred to someone else without your knowledge. If your registrar does not offer the locking service, change to a different registrar!
  
• Use an email address that you will always have – Never use someone’s personal email address for the WHOIS technical and administrative contacts. If they get hit by a bus or loose their email address, you can have trouble in the future changing your WHOIS information. Instead, use an email address that you will always be in control of – such as hostmaster@yourdomain.com .
  
• Use a strong password for your Registrar Account – the above protections are worthless if someone can break into your domain’s registrar account. Protect this password like it is the password to your bank account.
  
3. Third Party DNS – Not all DNS servers are made equal. For most registrars and hosting companies, DNS servers are an afterthought. For instance, most hosting companies offer only two DNS server addresses to point your domains to - even though five are allowed. To make matters worse, both of these servers will often be using IP addresses from the same C block and will be placed in close physical proximity to each other! Any kind of Internet disturbance, power outage or adverse weather condition could put all their hosted domains off the air. If you are paying for Internet advertising, this can be a huge waste of money as well as lost of profits. You can quickly check your domain’s DNS vulnerability by using Cricket Liu’s free DNS Advisor Tool at http://infoblox.com/services/dns_advisor.cfm . To prevent these potential problems, use a third party DNS for your domains. I recommend dnsmadeeasy.com as they are inexpensive, have multiple redundant servers around the world and offer a 100% uptime guarantee.

By taking the above steps you can now truly be the master of your domain