The Return of Erella.com: A Cautionary Tale

I often write about the importance of managing your domain names and caution people about what could happen should they fail to do so.

I recently witnessed a chilling example of this. Thankfully, this story has a happy ending.

Erella Ganon is a Toronto-based artist whom I have known for over a decade. She also happens to be a friend of my wife. On Friday night, my wife asked me to look into something on behalf of Erella. A few days prior, Erella had lost ownership of her domain name, erella.com, and she was very upset.

Erella had first registered erella.com in October, 2000 with domain registrar GoDaddy, and had been using it since then for her Website and email address. Her Website, located at www.erella.com, is where Erella showcases her work and promotes her services. It is her primary means of generating employment.

An artist and single mother, Erella supports her teenage daughter by doing a number of freelance creative assignments. Sadly, for many years, Erella has also been battling brain tumours. 2008 has been especially difficult for her as she's been in and out of the hospital for seven different surgeries. The good news is that she's on the mend.

During the last few months, in between surgeries and post-operative recovery, Erella was unable to do a lot of her normal day-to-day activities, and due to a misunderstanding, didn't renew her domain name like she normally did. The domain expired, and 26 days later it flowed into GoDaddy's expired domain auction, where it was bid upon and eventually acquired by a domain name speculator based in Hawaii.

Since I work at Tucows, one of the largest domain registrars in the world (and, full disclosure, a competitor of GoDaddy), I am very familiar with the domain name lifecycle and expired domain auctions. I knew that the domain speculator had broken no laws when he acquired the erella.com domain name. It expired. He bid on it. He paid for it. He now owned it.

To him, erella.com was just another domain name he won at auction. He didn't know the story behind how and why the domain expired, nor would anyone expect him to have known that.

At the time I first heard about this, Erella was convinced she'd lost her domain name forever, and was understandably very upset. Email messages to her were bouncing, and adding insult to injury, the domain speculator had added a banner ad for his Hawaiian real estate business to Erella's homepage.

I promised Erella that I would investigate what had happened and see what I could do to help. After researching and identifying the domain speculator, I contacted him via email on Saturday in Honolulu and convinced him to transfer the domain name to Erella.

By Sunday morning, erella.com was back in Erella's hands, and by mid afternoon her email and Website were up and running again.

Needless to say, Erella was ecstatic. I, on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised. This domain speculator responded to my inquiries and could be reasoned with; that is not always the case, and I have the scars to prove it.

The truly frightening thing is that this can happen to anyone who owns a domain name, and most people who find themselves in this difficult position don't know a domain name specialist like me that they can turn to for help.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer five very specific pieces of advice to you on how to avoid ever ending up in a situation like this.

1. Make sure you know exactly when your domain name registration expires. Domains are registered in one-year increments and need to be renewed prior to the end of the previous registration period. Put a reminder in your calendar to contact your domain registrar (domain registration service provider) a few weeks prior to expiry to renew your domain. Then make sure you actually take the five minutes it usually takes to make the renewal, either online via the registrar's Website or by calling them. (Don't know who your registrar is? Do a WHOIS lookup at who.is. Your registrar will be identified as the "Registrar".)
2. Ensure that your domain registrar has your most current and working email address on file. 99% of registrars inform their customers about upcoming domain expiries via email. If the email address they have for you doesn't work any more, you will miss the reminder messages and are at risk of forgetting to renew the domain name. In my professional experience, not having the right email address associated with your domain name is the number one reason people lose their domain names. This is your responsibility, not the registrar.
3. Verify that your domain registrar has up-to-date payment information on file for you. Even if you have set your domain name to auto-renew, that won't do you any good if the credit card the registrar has on file is no longer valid. Make sure your registrar has the correct credit card number and expiry date.
4. Domain name registration is not the same thing as Website hosting or email hosting. Even if you are getting these services from the same company, they are three different services and will all need to be renewed at some point in time. People often confuse Website hosting renewals with domain renewals and mistakenly think they've renewed both when they've actually only renewed one.
5. Finally, if your domain name does expire, act quickly. Contact your domain registrar as soon as possible and ask them what your renewal options are. In most cases, you only have 25-39 days to renew a domain that has expired. After that, it could be gone forever.

Comments

[Erella Ganon]

Bill, thank you again for your negotiating acumen. Thinking back on this experience, I am so thankful for your wife's involvement of course. It is your ability to research the Hawaiian speculator guy and size him up to determine what would convince him to give us the results we were hoping for. I honestly didn't entertain any likelihood that there was much of a possibility that he was going to be reasoned with. I am so pleased to have my domain back.
I really didn't think anyone would have been interested in erella.com other than someone named erella, and there are VERY FEW of us.
Thank you again
Erella

[Leesa Barnes]

Things have definitely changed. I remember 10 years ago when I had let a domain name expire, I could easily re-register it 2, 3 years later. That happened with leesabarnes.com. I registered it back in 2000, let it expire and I was surprised when in 2003, it was still available.

Today, if it expires, someone jumps on it. I've lost 2 domain names that way, although they weren't important to me as erella.com is to Erella.

Great tips you've provided and one of the things I've done with GoDaddy is a domain renewal consolidation. Instead of trying to remember the expiry dates for the 100 or so domain names I own that take place on a 100 different dates, I instead consolidate them to 3 dates in a given year. That means on March 31st, July 31st, November 30th, a certain number of my domain names will renew.

Although it's expensive to renew 30 or so domain names on the same day, it gives me peace of mind knowing that none will expire on me again without my knowledge.

And I do want to thank you, Bill, for acting on my behalf a few times. He's a wealth of domain name knowledge. I'm thankful that you're in my corner Bill.

[James]

I completely understand erella's pain, although possibly not to the same extent. I have learned my lesson about letting domain names expire.

As Leesa said, things aren't like they used to be. I would advise that if any part of you wants to keep a domain that you do not, under any circumstance let it expire. You will likely lose it forever. It only costs a few bucks to re-register it and if you're on the fence just go for it and give yourself another year to decide.

Bill seems like a really stand-up guy and is in the process of helping me on a similar matter, and I am very thankful he's in my corner as well.