Conscientious web site owners like to congratulate themselves for both ensuring the future of their web site and getting a great deal when they renew their domains for five, eight or ten years at a discount. All too often they are wrong on both counts.

Domain sellers are experts at harassing you into compliance. They start by not answering your e-mails or phone calls. When they do, it’s with a strange accent from a professed representative who claims it’s not his fault, and that he has no authority to fix it anyway. When you try to navigate their sites, they invariably distract you with added features and services—get this free by signing up for that. Then they frighten you with expirations, guilt you with unpaid invoices, confuse you with technical details, and just when you’ve lost all self respect and confidence, they offer to stroke your ego with this “big discount” (which you secretly hope will just keep them out of your hair for awhile). So you just pay it and then brag to your significant about what a great deal it was.

Your domain record is like a deed of ownership. It tells who owns your web site and where you want it to be hosted. It’s vital that your name, contact information and especially your e-mail address are current. If you move or change your e-mail address, your domain registrar might not be able to contact you when it’s time to pay the bill. When it’s just a year at a time, chances are you’re still getting mail forwarded to you. But over a five-year period there’s no telling where you’ve gone and what has changed, including your e-mail.

Sometimes registrars change ownership or go out of business. The largest registrar, Network Solutions, has changed hands three times. Nearly all the large registrars have likewise undergone mergers, acquisitions and major restructuring in the last five years. The Whois database will always retain your domain record (assuming it’s current), but what if the registrar who is going through all this doesn’t do it’s billing right, and your account falls into arrears? They could drop your domain or worse, sell it to someone else. I’ve personally seen domains lost for all these reasons, and it is most likely to happen with older accounts.

First of all, in most cases where one company claims a “big discount,” it is the same as or more than full price for many others. While the more expensive domain registrars often have better service, there is a more important service to remember, which is billing you every year to stay current. You give that up when you defer renewal for multiple years. So the phrase “you get what you pay for” applies even in domain registration.