Five mistakes teams make with domain management

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit domain management.

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• An expired domain is a self-inflicted outage
• Auto-renew and keep the contact address current
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Registrar access deserves the strongest protection you have. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Turning this into a decision

How to tell if yours is fine

Security is a maintenance habit rather than a purchase, which is why it drifts. Three things worth confirming about domain management before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Auto-renew and keep the contact address current — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.