Your website is important. Do not allow your domain name registration to expire, or bad guys will take your valuable address away from you.

In our society we are accustomed to things which must be renewed annually. Insurance, magazine subscriptions... that kind of thing. It is a VERY FOOLISH MISTAKE to assume your domain name is "just another one of those".

If you fail to renew your Trains subscription, you just renew. If you fail to renew your museum's domain, it will be taken by other people.

They will NOT give it back. They will extort it back to you, for somewhere between $500 and $10,000, proportionate to your Google PageRank, or, how well your site is promoted on the Web.

In my experience (as a web abuse-fighting professional), they copy the contents of your existing site, and load it onto their hijacked site. That seems "less than bad" until you realize you cannot change it. They do this to fool Google into believing your site has not been jacked (Google looks for those and zeroes out their PageRank). They will then:

- use it in email spam
- embed advertisements
- slip spyware onto your visitors
- Put spammy junk on inner pages, to use your reputation to rank with Google
- link to their own nasty sites, which boosts those sites' Google rank

There is a very simple cure for this risk.

You can prepay your domain registration up to 10 years in advance.

I recommend being at least 5 years out. It's just a few dollars and it saves a world of hurt. Go do it now. If you don't have all your "information", then do a 'whois' search to find the registrar, and then cold-call the registrar and ask them to extend it without proving you are the owner. That has worked for me.

One last thing: You don't want your email address to be with your ISP, because you are then held hostage to that ISP. Similarly, you don't want your domain registration with your web hoster. Have them with different companies so you are free to change web hosters at will. Web hosters often give "free" domain registration, that is not a value because domain registration is very cheap - like $12/year, $35 if you're with the expensive places.

I agree with registering domains longer than 1 year, and do so for all of my sites.

However, it brings up another issue. 5 years from now, will anyone at your organization remember to renew the site? Will the e-mail address still be valid?

If the site is being updated, that means you've got a webmaster, and typically he/she will understand these things. I'd suggest making sure it's kept track of somehow though, whether it's done as part of the yearly meetings or some other method.

Personally, I prefer using a hosting company / registrar that automatically renews it. I do this for my personal domains and sites as well as the one for The Conrail Historical Society. This way we're never caught with our pants down.

And there are people all over the rest of the world busy registering every possible abberation of existing organization's names, regardless of how distinctive or unusual they may be, in the hopes that somebody will need it and have to pay them to use it, or to advertise to those who are misdirected to the sites.

PC

And that should work. Except it doesn't. And that is the substance of my warning.

Sure it's convenient. But for instance thecrhs.org expires in less than 2 months. It could expire in 9 years 2 months, but no one has the $9/year. Your hoster pays it as a perk to keep you as a customer and it is a cost to them. They'll renew it as late as possible in case you leave.

One museum lost their domain because their credit card on file had expired. No big deal, the webmaster updated it. What no one realized is that the domain auto-renew DIDN'T auto-retry, even though it was part of a hosting package. Whose fault is this?

Worse, PIR (who administers .ORG) kept their domain in the active zonefile. So the site didn't go down - a critical telltale during the 25 day grace period. Boom, expire+25, and the site is full of ads for Acai Berry.

The ISP was "sympathetic".

Realistically it's gone. Bundled hosting includes a domain name, not your domain name. For the cost of hosting, no reasonable person expects the hoster to spend $500-$20,000 ransoming it back from the domainjacker, or spend a like amount sending a lawyer to grind through UDRP. You won't foot the bill yourself because your organization has better things to do with that money. You'll just restart your web presence from scratch while people go to the wrong site.

Bottom line: Protecting your domain is nobody's job but your own.