Sometimes it the easily overlooked things that can cause the biggest problems. This is one of them.

Once your name has been established online, what do you think one of the most devastating things could be for your business?

How about losing the use of your own web site address?

This incident was posted recently and it involved someone with a well established site and domain name.

We'll call it SiteA.com.

This site has approximately a 1/2 million visitors a month.

The problem was that when they initial created their domain name, they registered with an email address from another site (SiteB.com) that they had.

Time came and went.

The owner decided that SiteB.com wasn't needed anymore so he let it expire. After all, SiteA.com was his main focus now.

The only problem is that when SiteA.com came up for renewal, the renewal notice went to the SiteB.com email address. He no longer had the address and it had been purchased by a Russian.

SiteB.com's new owner requested from the registrar of SiteA.com that they transfer the domain name to the Russian's registrar.

Which they did.

After all, they sent the verification requests to the email address that was associated with the account. The new owner of SiteB.com confirmed the request and the transfer was made.

Ouch.

Setting Things Straight

The Registrar involved only provided limited help initially. After emails and phone calls, the issue was finally resolved but you can bet there was a lot of stress involved.

This site owner talked to the person who had done this. He admitted that he has about 30 sites in this same situation. One of these sites is a $60 million dollar business. If there is anything positive about this situation, it is that he is making efforts to resolve it with those sites.

So what can you do?

There are few things you can do to safeguard yourself from this situation:

• Use the site's primary email address as the contact email address that it is registered with
• Take time to list out your existing domain names. Find out when they expire, and what the contact address is. You can easily find out this information by entering your addresses at www.coolwhois.com
• You may want to use an automatic reminder service to let you know when your domain is 60 days out from expiration. I use my.yahoo.com for their free calendar feature with future reminders to be emailed to me
• Consider using "Transfer Lock" with your registrar if it is offered. This prevents a third party from transferring your domain without your expressed approval

It is a bit frightening how easy it would be to make such a bad mistake. Now you know how to prevent it.

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