On The Hill: Radar Hill Blog

Recently there was an Internet domain registrar that went out of business and put untold thousands of websites into limbo. These websites were no longer visible and there was no contact with the registrar to fix it. A terrible and stressful situation for everyone involved.

Two of our clients decided to DIY their domain and were registered at this company, and they could not get access to their account to transfer them to another provider. They had no idea what to do or how to go about solving their predicament.

Radar Hill stepped in and spent days wrangling with the tech, administration, and billing departments of the defunct company and its representatives to solve the problem. Our clients had to suffer days without a website, anxious thinking that they might not get their domain back, and hundreds of dollars in expense.

Luckily after much back and forth communication, many emails, and several phone calls, we were able to get the domains and these websites up and running again.

Register Your Domain with a Reputable Company

This is a good reminder that it is important to entrust your domain with a reliable company to avoid this potential headache. Here at Radar Hill we take care of the domains for 90% of our clients and we register them under a very reliable registrar.

Our clients retain ownership of the domain, but we administer all the registration and technical details. Over the years this has shown to be the most reliable way to take care of domains for our customers.

Domain Record Updates

Sometimes the server on which a website is hosted needs to change, either for an upgrade or an IP address change, or some other technical reason, and the credentials from the domain need to be updated.

When we take care of these situations there is no problem, no stress, we know exactly what to do and we go into the domain settings to make the necessary changes, and everything works seamlessly. There's no downtime and for the most part our clients don't even notice that something has occurred.

When a client registers their own domain and has full control of it, they need to make these changes themselves. Most of the time it goes okay, we send them instructions on what they need to do, usually explaining how to login to the domain registrar and make changes to the A record.

However, there are times when it doesn’t go as smoothly. It’s happened before that a client has lost their credentials or has a problem following the instructions, causing the website to go down, and then there is needless stress and expenses to fix the situation.

If You Admin Your Own Domain

There will always be people who prefer to have full control of their domain and want to do it all themselves. In that case, there are a few very important points to keep in mind to ensure the smooth running of the domain and website.

• Ensure you can access your domain registrar on a regular basis
• Record and save your login credentials in a safe location (password wallet, last pass, etc)
• Familiarize yourself with all the Domain Name settings: A, AAAA, CNAME, PTR, NS, MX, SOA, and TXT

Another important thing to keep in mind is if you change your email address don’t forget to update your domain credentials. As domain renewals are usually done yearly or even longer, it can be easy to lose login access if an email is changed. This has happened to a few clients where they never got the notification their domain was up for renewal and so it lapsed, and it’s a complicated situation to get everything sorted again.

Over the years we have rescued several domains and it’s always a stressful and frustrating situation. The very best way to ensure the continued operation of your website is to trust Radar Hill to take care of your domain. To incentivize this situation, we offer a Domain Assurance at no charge. For more information get in touch, it is our mission to keep your website up and running 100%.