tips Why you should renew domains in advance

[AbdulBasit.com]

Hello everyone,

Today I wanted to share my point of view on why you should renew your domains in advance and the benefits of it.

So let’s check at how renewing your domains for a longer period than a year might prevent a big headache in the course of time.

1) If you've developed a website and worked hard for marketing your brand and receiving a great number of audience on your domain name, simply don’t let that site suddenly go dark because you forget to renew the domain on due time. So when your registration expires, any services associated with the domain (your website, email service, and so on) stops working. Sometimes the domain renewal alerts can easily get overlooked due to aggressive spam filters on your email account, an overflowing inbox, or any of life’s other distractions.

2) As it may happen with anyone and there are some situations happening around us which are not in our control like the current global situation regarding the virus and its impact to overall humanity. This may lead to weak financial condition, savings are needed to be used for some emergency and more important needs and last but not the least, the lack of domain sales can kill the cash flow in such tough times.

3) There are also some cases where investors tend to renew domains each and every month as the renewal comes for their large portfolio of domains but with any sudden death in family or the domain owner itself, hospitalization, any case of emergency, etc may put your domains at risk of expiring and ultimately to drop. So it's better to renew a lot in advance.

4) Another positive side of renewing the domain is like when any endusers or domain brokers find the domain is near to expiration, they may try to wait for the domain to drop and either hand register it or backorder to secure the domain. But when your domain is renewed in advance let's suppose for an addition of 3 or 5 years, chances are high that the interested party would try to contact and buy directly from you rather than waiting for years for the domain to expire.

So never give a slight hope to anyone that your good domains are going to drop anywhere in the near future. Give yourself peace of mind by renewing your domains far in advance so you don’t accidentally lose them.

As for my portfolio, when it was around 1,000 domains, it was quite easy for me to renew domains for at least a couple of years ahead of expiry. But with the portfolio growing and now little over 4,000 domains, it's difficult to renew that much in advance. But still I have all my domain keepers renewed for an additional 1 year.

Feel free to give your feedback about my strategy and share your own to let others know.

 

[AbdulBasit.com]

I'm not very good at this and often let my names go into redemption period. I'd blame it on the number of domains (8,000+), but I've always had the same bad habit even with 2,000 names and end up spending more on acquiring names rather than the renewals. I've been better about it lately, but still have some improving to do.

I've included couple more reasons why you should renew in advance:

1. If your domain expires, your Afternic listings will be flagged and pulled off the site, so you'll need to waste time resubmitting the listings. Plus, the 4 weeks that the domains are not listed could end up reducing your overall sales by 8% (1 month / 12 months in a year).
2. For your best domains, I always renew a year ahead of time now. About a year ago, I had 2 of my best domains (in my top 5%) go into the redemption period and I didn't get the proper notices and a software glitch (or something else) caused the domains to not be available to renew. The 2 domains cost me $2,500 originally, and I nearly lost them. So for any domains you really care about, take extra precautions, put them in a "top domains" folder and renew them early.

I'd also add, that you should audit your top 5%-10% of domains yearly (maybe at tax time), as these will be the domains most likely to be hijacked. All it takes is a rogue tech employee with an ill-intentioned plan, or even a software glitch. How many of us would notice 1 domain out of 1,000 or in my case 1 out of 8,000 missing? Might take a while.

8,000 domains is simply wow!

Thanks for adding couple of other points and your first one is very important. I've noticed that happening for my expired domains but never thought of adding it while writing this post. So really a good point to remember and not let your domains to expire especially if the domains are listed with Afternic.

 

[AbdulBasit.com]

I sold a name this month after I moved 34 domains from one registrar and had it get renewed. It still had good time before expiry. The buyer bought it and even created an account and accepted push. So you dont know. So renew the ones you want to keep and wait for their sale.

This happens... Before I used to think that I wasted money by renewing in advance and here goes the domain get sold. But later I realized that it's around $10 extra I paid for the sold domain which is very fair when I'm selling it for thousands of dollars. Because I believe that $10 is paying off well.

 

[Recons.Com]

This strategy works too but you've to consider other factors as well as mentioned in the initial post. To be on the safe side and have peace of mind.

May I suggest an experiment for you since you are already renewing some long term? Make the list of all names that need to be renewed within next 12 months. Use excel to randomly assign a value (0 or 1 for example). Renew those that have value of 1 for multiple years, while for the others just turn on auto-renewal. Then check if there was any considerable performance difference.

 

[Pazu]

Do you mean if a domain is sold via Sedo and has less than 60 days left to expiry, Sedo asks to renew the domain before transferring? If yes, that's not fair. Didn't knew it by the way.

Seems like a fair policy to me, especially since most buyers are not professional domainers. I was reminded of the following anecdote, for your consideration:

I once bought an ngTLD domain which was parked and registered to Uniregistry. I valued this domain for personal reasons and negotiated up to $3000 final offer. The broker kept trying to get a much higher price. After 10 months, I was notified that the buyer agreed to my price. I somewhat reluctantly sent my hard-earned cash and it was pushed to my Uniregistry account, only for me to find it was expiring IMMEDIATELY with $108 more due!

Being relatively new to domaining, I was far from enthused, feeling a bit stabbed in the back... like the seller failed to extract the desired maximum payment and was sticking me with his bill! I was unable to transfer it out with a 60 day lock and thinking I might lose my acquisition, I renewed it on Uniregistry and paid the renewal a second time when I transferred the domain out 60 days later.

I brought my disdain up to the broker who denied knowledge saying they couldn't tell if a domain was set to auto-renew or not and that he would bring it up at his next sales meeting.

SEDO probably doesn't want their clients feeling as I did, and I also have become rather generous in handing the following renewal requirement for my buyers.

 

[AbdulBasit.com]

May I suggest an experiment for you since you are already renewing some long term? Make the list of all names that need to be renewed within next 12 months. Use excel to randomly assign a value (0 or 1 for example). Renew those that have value of 1 for multiple years, while for the others just turn on auto-renewal. Then check if there was any considerable performance difference.

Thanks for your suggestion.

I think then I'll have to select only those domains which are priced in same range like low-mid 4 figures. But then again I cannot have any concrete data to rely upon because each and every domain is unique.

 

[AbdulBasit.com]

Seems like a fair policy to me, especially since most buyers are not professional domainers. I was reminded of the following anecdote, for your consideration:

I once bought an ngTLD domain which was parked and registered to Uniregistry. I valued this domain for personal reasons and negotiated up to $3000 final offer. The broker kept trying to get a much higher price. After 10 months, I was notified that the buyer agreed to my price. I somewhat reluctantly sent my hard-earned cash and it was pushed to my Uniregistry account, only for me to find it was expiring IMMEDIATELY with $108 more due!

Being relatively new to domaining, I was far from enthused, feeling a bit stabbed in the back... like the seller failed to extract the desired maximum payment and was sticking me with his bill! I was unable to transfer it out with a 60 day lock and thinking I might lose my acquisition, I renewed it on Uniregistry and paid the renewal a second time when I transferred the domain out 60 days later.

I brought my disdain up to the broker who denied knowledge saying they couldn't tell if a domain was set to auto-renew or not and that he would bring it up at his next sales meeting.

SEDO probably doesn't want their clients feeling as I did, and I also have become rather generous in handing the following renewal requirement for my buyers.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Since I don't deal in ngTLDs, I didn't had the idea of such bad tricks some people play. Then it makes sense to implement what Sedo has done.

 

[Recons.Com]

Thanks for your suggestion.

I think then I'll have to select only those domains which are priced in same range like low-mid 4 figures. But then again I cannot have any concrete data to rely upon because each and every domain is unique.

you are welcome! yes, you could exclude the best ones and then assign the random values to the remainder. And then just compare 0 to 1.

 

[Rich]

Do you mean if a domain is sold via Sedo and has less than 60 days left to expiry, Sedo asks to renew the domain before transferring? If yes, that's not fair. Didn't knew it by the way.

Yes just happened with one domain, perhaps a customer request. Another cost to keep in mind, outside commission.

 

[karmaco]

I totally agree with you @AbdulBasit.com about renewing your best names or any for sure keepers in advance particularly with domain price hikes on the horizon for next year.

However, This is all dependent on sales and cashflow. Some should be set aside for renewals from any sale. Its all about budgeting. Another benefit to renewing early is if tough times do come you are safe and don’t have to sacrifice your better names.

I don’t judge anyone else’s decisions but for me it would just be unnecessary stress and time consuming to decide at last minute what I am keeping.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Yes just happened with one domain, perhaps a customer request. Another cost to keep in mind, outside commission.

Yes it also happened to me. I had not realized it either. So in pricing domains at Sedo near to expiry keep in mind you will have to pay a renewal. If it is $9 not a big deal, but if a higher renewal can be significant.
Bob

 

[Sakthimicro]

Hi all I exactly,
I am also renew for more than 2years my top 10 domains, when you try to renew more than 3 years, first transfer tour domain to trusted domain registrar then renew additional years

thanks

 

[iDestroyer]

I would rather put the funds into growth, but, eventually, yes, will divert the funds into renewing early.

It could be a good cash flow management and tax optimization tool.

For developed projects, renewing ahead could also help with SEO as another, albeit weak, positive signal.

I have tested domain expiry date as a "seo factor" and it failed, expiry date does not help with SEO in any ways or forms. i also tested how long it will take google to tank my seo on a expired domain? it took them 2 months to notice that domain is not even LIVE right now. this is not a single domain test but over 20 domains were used. just sharing, in your exp. you maybe right too.

 

[Recons.Com]

I have tested domain expiry date as a "seo factor" and it failed, expiry date does not help with SEO in any ways or forms. i also tested how long it will take google to tank my seo on a expired domain? it took them 2 months to notice that domain is not even LIVE right now. this is not a single domain test but over 20 domains were used. just sharing, in your exp. you maybe right too.

It is supposed to be a WEAK signal, meaning it would be hard to notice as a standalone. Not sure about your methodology of testing and cleanliness of the experiment. But by the fact that you also mingle in Google not monitoring for domains expiry every few weeks, I don't think it would be done properly. Google is not actively monitoring every page it indexed. It assumes nothing changed unless it is told so with some scheduled re-crawls.

It would be dumb for Google to ignore this signal, as chances of an older name being used as spammy content provider is considerably less than a fresh reg. It could be that Google is not even focusing on the reg data, but on the data Google first found out about it.

 

[rajdomains]

I agree with you @AbdulBasit.com

I am doing this from last year for all the premium domains I own. Renewed them for at least 3 years in advance.

It's good to renew premium gems for years and everyone who owns premium domains must do.

 

[koolishman]

I agree with you @AbdulBasit.com

I am doing this from last year for all the premium domains I own. Renewed them for at least 3 years in advance.

It's good to renew premium gems for years and everyone who owns premium domains must do.

How do you define "Premium"?

 

[rajdomains]

Domains worth minimum $1k or more, no matter its hand reg. or acquired through auctions. Valuable domains are premium domains.

Many domainer hand reg domains to flip so renewing them for years makes no sense.

 

[koolishman]

Domains worth minimum $1k or more, no matter its hand reg. or acquired through auctions. Valuable domains are premium domains.

Many domainer hand reg domains to flip so renewing them for years makes no sense.

1K valuation per who?

 

[rajdomains]

Per, Domain realistic value

 

[nononsense123]

I agree with your points @AbdulBasit.com
I would add one more.. it's entirely psychological.. but renewing your domains for 3-5 years gives you a position of strength in negotiations. The potential buyer knows you can sit on it for 5 years without spending another dime. So you don't come/seem to come from a place of desperation to the negotiating table.

 

[AbdulBasit.com]

I agree with your points @AbdulBasit.com
I would add one more.. it's entirely psychological.. but renewing your domains for 3-5 years gives you a position of strength in negotiations. The potential buyer knows you can sit on it for 5 years without spending another dime. So you don't come/seem to come from a place of desperation to the negotiating table.

Yes, rightly said