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Did you forget your own name?

Now before you go reaching for your identification to check who you are, let me reassure you… I’m talking about your domain name.

Forgetting to renew a domain name can result in HUGE headaches, including paying additional fees or even having a competitor or domain name reseller grab your prized domain name.

Depending on their goals, they may use your old domain name for their site, they may agree to sell it back to you at an exorbitant price, or they may even completely refuse to sell name back to you, essentially holding it hostage.

Sure, there may be legal action you can take if you have trademarks in place, but that takes time- and during all this time, your site and your e-mail are down!

So, how do we avoid all of this in first place? Roll up your sleeves and let’s get started, shall we?

=============================== #1. First, let’s check! =============================== Crank up your favorite web browser and visit web site of registrar for your domain name, or just choose one from list below. These are just a few of registrars I could think of, not an inclusive list, and are simply in alphabetical order.

Dotster: https://secure.registerapi.com/services/whois.php

GoDaddy: https://registrar.godaddy.com/whois.asp

Network Solutions: http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index.jhtml

Register.com http://www.register.com/whois_lookup.cgi

Once there, follow prompts to perform a whois search for your domain name.

Verify expiration date for your domain name, and put a reminder on your calendar (RIGHT NOW) to renew it at least 30 days prior to date given for current expiration.

If you are already within that 30 day window, renew your domain name while you are thinking of it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

=================================== #2. The expiration process =================================== All is not lost if your domain name has expired. There is a period of time after its expiration that you can still reclaim your prized possession.

Here’s how it works.

On date that a domain expires, registrar removes it from root servers (the list of domains currently registered globally); therefore, any web sites or e-mail associated with domain name will begin to stop working.

What is a Domain Name? Before we can go into what a domain name is I'm going to tell you why we need them as answers compliment each other. The Internet is just a really big collection of connected computers (a network). For purpose of explaining domain names you can think of Internet a bit like phone system and just like phone system every computer on Internet has it's own phone number except an Internet phone number is called an IP addresses. This address is made up of up to 12 digits in form 123.123.123.123, computers use these IP addresses to send information to each other over Internet.

When Internet was first created it quickly became clear that these IP addresses were not easy to remember and another method was need to make these addresses more human friendly. The solution to this was Domain Name System (DNS). Basically DNS is a really really big phone book for computers. When you type a web site address into your web browser it checks DNS for that website name and finds IP address. Once it has IP address it can then send a message to that computer and ask it for web page you wanted.

Ok so you know a domain name is part of a web site address but which part? Lets look at a website address so we can identify and discuss what bit of it is a domain name. http://www.itxcel.com/index.html

The above address is home page of itXcel web site. It can be split into 3 main parts. The first part is http:// this just tells your web browser what kind of information it is going to get and how to get it. The last part is /index.html this is name of files on remote computer that you want your browser to get. The bit in middle www.itxcel.com is a domain name. This is name that your computer sends to DNS to get back IP address.

So you know what a domain name is and that there is a phone book called DNS to change your easy to remember domain name into an IP address that you computer can understand. The Internet phone book (DNS) is special in that everyone on Internet needs to be able to use it. This makes DNS very very big (100+ million addresses big). Due to size of this phone book it needed to have a carefully organised and managed structure.