Muar, Johor -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/09/2014 -- A business’ domain name, a very significant part of any site’s advertising scheme, is found all over the place: in web directories, search engines, linkbuilding sites, and even in business cards and print promotional materials. Losing it is like losing the entirety of the business. Definitely a waste of everything one can imagine just to get it back.

When Businesses Lose their Domain Names

Failure to renew a business’ domain name is the main reason why some simply lose their “web identity”. The worst nightmare one can have is to failure to renew it and then have another person or business get it. The process of having a domain name becomes available for others to use is not a devious plot at all. In fact, the Internet Commission on Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN authorizes registrars to obliterate domain registrations that are not renewed on a certain period of time. Of course, no stupid person or business owner would ever want to let go a domain name after establishing web popularity. This is the reason why ICANN gives a grace period for this error to be corrected.

The Grace Period

ICANN requires a 30-day grace period (or a holding period) giving ample time for business owners to renew an expired domain name. This is also a way by which registrars would have sufficient time to resolve scam complaints about an expired domain name. WEBNICC, a leading web hosting provider, delineates how the process works when a domain registration has expired and how it can be redeemed.

According to WEBNICC, they send out email reminders to their customers a few months before the expiration of a domain name. The reminder email is sent out to the registered email address upon signing up. As the expiration date approaches, more email reminders are being sent out. Not getting a response from the email address where the reminder email was sent to does not necessarily mean the domain name will be dropped off immediately. A day after the expiry of the domain name, the website of the expired domain would be down and all email addresses for that domain would stop working. This is the best way by which the owner of the domain would reach out to WEBNICC. Within 30 -45 days from the expiry of the domain, only the owner of the expired domain is allowed to renew it. Despite this “grace period”, the expired domain name would technically means that the said domain name is no longer a property of the owner, rather, it is under the “redemption period” phase and whois lookup would show the same status. Once the said grace period has expired and the previous domain owner still failed to renew the domain name, whois lookup would reveal a “pending deletion” status where no one (even the previous domain owner) would be able to renew it. It would be after a few days after the “pending deletion” status that the domain name would become available for a new registration.

What’s Next and the High Cost of Renewing a “Dropped” Domain Name

Getting back an expired and dropped domain name registration is too costly in that it might take about more than $200 sometimes to restore it. WEBNICC explained that the process for this is kind of tedious, the same reason for the costly amount that any previous domain name owner needs to incur just to get the get back an old domain name.

What Needs to be Done

Keeping the contact information linked to the domain name registration updated is a very important thing any domain owner needs to do. Missing out on a single important reminder from the domain registrar would cause a big impact to the domain registration in the long run. Keeping in touch with the domain registrar is as crucial as it can ever be to make sure that that precious domain name registration won’t expire and one’s website identity won’t be lost in a snap.

About WEBNICC
WEBNICC is one of the leading web hosting providers that offers a money-back guarantee program to ensure customer satisfaction of their products and services, guarantees a response time within six hours for all technical support requests being submitted, and entitles every customer to a 99.9% monthly uptime guarantee which means that if the server drops below a 99.9% uptime in a given month, they will refund that month of hosting to the customer. As a hosting provider that believes in simplicity, WEBNICC wants web hosting to be one less worry in an already stressful world.