Master of Your Domain
My campus magazine just wrote up a little piece about the work I do in Web production and sustainability. Part of the article talked about the design work that I did with Kairos; another part of the article talked about how when a URL disappears–whether because of deleted file or an expired domain name–it threatens the sustainability of the Web and the ethos of sites doing the linking.
As irony would have it, the piece appeared the same day that Kairos’s technorhetoric.net URL somehow wound up in the hands of one of the many domain brokers that have bots waiting around for domains to expire. Meaning that the URL in the article is bad, as are the many other pages and articles that provide links to the technorhetoric.net domain.
This is unfortunate, and I hope that the Kairos people can somehow secure their domain from the broker who now controls it. But Kairos’s trouble is instructive about the care and feeding of domain names.
As everyone who’s ever bought a domain knows, you don’t really buy a domain–you effectively lease it for a period of time, usually ranging from a year to three years. Fail to renew the domain, and one of those automated brokers will snatch it up.
Now most domain registrars will email you before your domain expires. They want your business. Some will email multiple times. But of course–and I suspect this might have happened with Kairos–you can’t depend on those emails to be sent. A server glitch on the registrar’s end or a spam filter on yours is all it takes to prevent that important reminder from reaching you. (It also goes without saying that you shouldn’t register domains with a school or work email address, which may expire when you graduate or change jobs.)
Besides, the identity you establish on a domain is far too precious a thing to be left to your registrar to remind you to renew.
So do the smart thing, and put your domain expirations on your calendar. And then mark the calendar a month out, too, so that a failed credit card payment or other glitch does not wind up costing you your domain name.