Your dot-COM address is the most valuable part of your web site. It’s like owning real estate, and it comes with a “deed”. While registering a domain name is cheap at less than $30, if you lose it to someone else the starting bid to get it back is $200.

If your contact info is incorrect, then the Registrar, which holds millions of domains, will not make any extra effort to contact you. Renewal payments, transfers and mergers between registrars can all cause the domain to fail.

A current e-mail address is the single most important piece of information your domain record needs. Most all transactions involving a domain involve e-mail. A fax number may sometimes be substituted and makes a good backup source of information.

Unethical or lazy service providers are the single biggest cause of domain loss. More than half of all webmasters and host providers will register the domain to themselves as the owner and/or primary contact. The danger is not so much that they will steal your domain, but that they will go away or out of business and leave you without being able to reclaim it.

Check your domain record. Go to Whoisd.com and type in your domain name. You should be listed as the Registrant (owner) and also the Administrative Contact, not your webmaster. Service providers can be listed as the Technical Contact.

Did you ever get a letter or invoice from Domain Registry of America or some other Internet company you didn’t know about. Unless you have privacy protection on your domain record, you’ll get some of these. They’ll take your money, and some will transfer your domain.

Don’t think that paying for several years at a time will absolve you from keeping your domain record updated. It’s better to pay for it every year and keep it updated than to register it for half price and never see it again. Even the biggest registrars have been bought and sold three times in the last several years, and you don’t know how well they will keep track of your information.

The best service providers will renew your domain automatically and bill you later. You might pay a little extra for that assurance, but they keep in touch with you and make sure you’re taken care of.