You get used to your website being up and available, no problem for a couple of years until one day when you type your site’s domain into a browser and its not there! Your domain has expired and your site is down.
This happened recently to a client of ours. The reminders were going to an old email address and the domain wasn’t set to auto-renew. We had contacted our client to give a “heads up” but other day to day matters had monopolised their time. On Friday afternoon we received a support ticket reporting the site as down but we were seeing it as still up. The domain was in the process of lapsing and the site was on its way down for the weekend – not ideal for a hotel website to say the least.
So we got in touch with our client and after a couple of calls between us we managed to track down who held the domain and who had the login details to renew online. The site went back up later that night and was available over the weekend.
To prevent this happening the WMS as a courtesy service tracks all the domains registered within it and we get in touch with clients when domains are due to lapse. Also if your domain is about to lapse you will see the following when you edit your website in the WMS:
“The domain for this site will expire soon! See “View Domain Info” in your Site Properties for more details. “
So while we don’t manage your DNS directly we can help remind you about domain renewal dates. You can also access your domain info yourself at any time in the WMS:
WMS > Admin > Manage Sites > Domain Info > DomainTools Whois
For all involved on this occasion it was a much nicer feeling to go home for the weekend a little later but with the site safely up again. But to avoid situations like this we recommend checking when your domain is due, heeding the WMS warnings and watching out for our reminder emails.
Best Wishes
Stuart Ferguson – WMS Support