If you own domains and deal with domain name renewals then you will know that owning a domain is akin to leasing a house rather than buying one; although you may legally own a domain, you do so only for the period you remain the registrant. For this reason you have to be on top of the auto renewal process to ensure that you don’t renew domains that are of little worth to you, and that valuable domains don’t drop.
Most registrars notify you of the fact that your domain is due to expire, or hasn’t auto renewed due to a billing error, or that you are letting it drop intentionally. The domain then goes into a delete cycle, and after a period of around ninety days is then available on the open market for someone else to register. When you resell domains, it is imperative that you have an auto renew option for your customers, as you will find that it is a popular feature and something that they know and love.
Things like a change in address of credit card details can mean that the billing fails to go through, which can cause all sorts of problems for your website and company. But fear not, it happens to the best of us and we all experience that sinking feeling when we realise we have missed something key. Disney, the multibillion pound corporation responsible for the happiness of our children and home of Mickey Mouse and co, had the same problem this year. With a domain portfolio as big as the one that Disney has, it’s no wonder that every now and again, one goes awry, and this happened earlier this year with the domain clubpenguin.com.
In 2007 Disney purchased the company Club Penguin, an online gaming site for children aged between six and fourteen which offers a change to own an animated penguin that lives in Antarctica and interacts with other penguins. When purchased the site had over seven hundred thousand paying subscribers and cost the brand over seven hundred million dollars.
But someone should have renewed it, and in an oversight, the site expired on the 13th of June this year. The site was down for a total of eight hours causing chaos amongst the children who have come to love the site. The domain has now been renewed until 2020, so children across the world can rest assured that they won’t have their site disrupted for a long while.