A practical checklist for domain management

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Run through this the next time domain management comes up.

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The checklist

• An expired domain is a self-inflicted outage
• Auto-renew and keep the contact address current
• Registrar access deserves the strongest protection you have
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

An expired domain is a self-inflicted outage. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. Three things worth confirming about domain management before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Registrar access deserves the strongest protection you have — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.