Small business website owners should be careful about expiration of their www domains. I’ve warned readers before about the problem of registrars registering domains for customers and the “owner” (registrant) is listed as the registar not the customer. You should be listed as the registrant, and it’s easy to verify by searching Google for “WhoIs” to find a site to confirm your website expiration date.

There are companies such as Snapnames.com, Enom.com, and Pool.com who specialize in grabbing popular domain names that expire. They have the technology to track expiring domain names and selectively go after the best ones in the hope of capturing a valuable www domain for resale.

The expiration of any domain goes through a grace period, a redemption period, a locked period, and then the final deletion. This time frame is approximately 75 days which can slip by quickly for small business owners busy running their day to day operations, so do not ignore your domain expiration. If you rarely go to your website or mistakenly ignore an email announcing renewal, your site could cost you significantly more than necessary to recover.