Domain Name Management

This post assumes you have already established a domain name portfolio and are looking to consolidate the management to one registrar, or just looking to maintain better personal records so that you can keep on top of the managerial aspects of your portfolio.

For anyone with a large portfolio of domain names, it is essential that you have systems in place to effectively manage these domains. Corporate entities will tend to have a specialised company who manage all aspects of their domains, from the registration, domain name hosting, reporting and renewals. However, not everyone can afford these specialist services which can easily run into thousands of dollars per month to maintain, and so a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach is often required. A portfolio of several hundred or thousand names, therefore, can require a lot of attention.

Why have a portfolio management system at all?
Simply so that you know every domain that you have, where it is hosted, and when it expires. That’s the basic reason. Without these you could easily forget a name and either lose it completely, or just forget about it and have trouble accessing it at a time when you need it.

Many registrars do some of the work for you, and are keen to manage your portfolios so that they get your business exclusively; but in reality individuals and small companies will have names held with various registrars and do not with to go through the hassle of consilidation - especially if they have very little information about the domains at present.

The key to managing your portfolio is to ensure you have as much relevant information about your names as possible, and that this information is up to date. The information you will require may also influence your decision of who to use when registering or managing your domain names. For this simple domain management system we are going to create a spreadsheet with all of the domains and the relevant information.

Create a new spreadsheet and in the first row enter the following 14 headings:
Domain Name
Admin Email
Registration Date
Expiration Date
Registrar
User ID
Password
Authorisation Code
Lock Status
Renewal Fee
Renewal Status
Nameservers
Website
Notes

These headings will create the base of information you need to manage your domain portfolio effectively. We’ll go through them one by one and explain what they are, and where you will find the information.

Domain Name
Obviously it’s critical to know what domains you have, and if you have over ten domains you no doubt have already created a list of them somewhere to assist you.
Log in to your domain name provider’s portal and look at the lists of names they provide you, where possible export the names to a suitable format such as excel, and simply gather all of your names and paste into notepad.

Tool tip: If your provider does not offer an export function, simply copy and paste the table where they list the names in full and use a service such as domain cleaner to strip out the domain names from the other content.

Once you have a complete list of all of your names, paste them into the spreadsheet under the heading ‘Domain Name’.

Admin Email
It is essential that the administrative email for the domain is up to date and leads to an email address that is active, and which you have access to. Notices for your domain renewal will go here, as will any requests for transferring the name to another registrar - either authorised or unauthorised attempts - so you need to be able to view the messages going here.

When selecting the administrative email to use for your registrations, it is worthwhile using a dedicated address. Create an email for domains@yourprimarydomainname.tld or admin@ so that you can keep it separate from your personal email. It’s often a good idea to use this email for both the registrant and administrative information.
There is one exception to this, and that is to use an alternative administrative email for your primary domain name. That is, you should not use domains@mydomainname.com as the administrative contact for mydomainname.com. This is a circular reference and if you had any issue with the name which brought down the website and email, and happened to forget your password, you would not be able to get it reissued to the address whilst it is not working. Vital time would then be spent contacting the registrar and convincing them you are the rightful owner of the name in order to gain access to your control panel.

Beware: With some registrars you may find that they list themselves as the admin contact for the name. Most will do this as part of a webhosting package and is so they can maintain control, and some will charge you for changing it and transferring the name away.

For most names you can do a whois lookup to get the administrative contact, otherwise you can log in to your provider’s control panel and find it there.

Registration Date
Enter this as soon as you register a name. The information is available from the whois record and your domain provider.

Although this is not critical, it’s good to have for completion and to act as a renewal checker.

Expiration Date
Available from whois or provider’s control panel.

It is essential that the expiration for your names are up to date. You wish to renew names in a timely manner and for you to be able to budget for upcoming renewals. The spreadsheet can be sorted by renewal date so you can see what is coming up for renewal in the near future. Your registrar should send out renewal reminder’s to you.

Note that on most TLD registrations, the expiration date will be the yearly anniversary date from registration, (though there are some exceptions) so if your .com domain was shows a registration date of 1st January 2006 and your expiration date shows 23rd June 2007 - you will probably have a mistake somewhere and may not know for sure when the name is to be renewed.

Make sure you keep up to date with the formalities of registration for all TLDs you have names under so you can be sure to have the correct expiration date.
Examples:
.biz domains expire 1 year minus 1 day from registration. So if registered on 1st Jan 2007, it will expire 31st Dec 2007, not 1st Jan 2008.
.uk are registered for 2 years at a time.
.eu and .be names expire at the end of the month of anniversary of registration or transfer.
So, a .eu registered on 1st Jan 2007 would expire on 31st Jan 2008. If you changed provider or ownership of the name on 17th April 2007, the new expiration date would be 30th April 2008.

Be sure to update this column as soon as you renew or transfer a name.

Registrar
Enter the registrar where the name is currently held. This can normally by found on a whois record if you don’t know.

User ID
Your User ID for the registrar where the name is held.

Password
Your password for the registrar where the name is held. This should correspond to the User ID.

Authorisation Code
For many names, especially gTLDs, you are now required to enter an authorisation code when you wish to transfer a name to another registrar. This code is unique to the domain name and proves that you are authorised to initiate and approve transfers.

Some registrars allow you to get this information online via your control panel (DirectNic.com, Enom.com), others require that it is sent to the administrative email for the account or domain name (godaddy.com, networksolutions.com), whereas others may require that you telephone them to find it out (register.com).

You will be required to give this code to your new registrar when transferring names, or in any approval emails you are sent when transferring.

Lock Status
gTLDs can be locked to prevent anyone from transferring them, even with an authorisation code. This is an added layer of security and should be used for all of your domains where possible.

For non-moving domains, the status should be ‘locked’. This column is useful when transferring names as you will be able to see at a glance which names have been unlocked and are ready for transfer without having to do a lookup on the name.

Note that some registrars will automatically relock a name if you make a change to it (so if you unlock it, and then change contact details, it may be relocked); others will automatically relock it after a week of it first being unlocked. This gives you time to transer, but the security of it not remaining on unlocked.

You can generally unlock a name via your registrar’s control panel, but in some cases you may be required to unlock by getting in contact with them first.

Renewal Fee
Make a note of the renewal fee for names with your providers. This will assist in budgeting for renewals. Note that with many ccTLDs the price of renewal will be less than the price of registration, check with your registrar at the time of registration and ask that you are informed of any future changes in prices.

Renewal Status
Many registrars allow you to ‘auto-renew’ a name, meaning it will be renewed and you will be charged unless you tell them not to renew it. Use this column to state if it is on an automatic or manual renewal, and also if you wish to lapse the name instead of renewing it.

Nameservers
Note which nameservers the name should be on. If your site goes down for any reason, check if it is on these nameservers. If they are, it will give you a good idea of which hosting company to contact to fix the issue. If it isn’t, you know there may be a problem with the name and perhaps your registrar. You can then change the name back to the correct nameservers and get it back up and running before investigating why they were changed.

Website
Indicate here if the website is live, dead, pointing to another URL or set up as a Pay Per Click site. If you suddenly visit one of your sites and see, for example, a PPC site instead of a live website you had been expecting, you can check to see if it was meant to be on PPC or not here before investigating why it has changed.

Notes
Enter any other notes that don’t deserve their own category, which could include answers to ‘password reminders’ for your registrar accounts, original language characters and translations for IDNS, resource records added to your names, which monetizing site a name is with, or if you find discount coupons for a domain renewal with one of your registrars.

Completing and maintaining the information above will go some way to ensure you are fully aware of your domain portfolio and the shape it is in. You will see at a glance where your names are and how to access them, when they are due for renewal and how they should be set up. All of this information will allow you to budget for your domain names and easily access them should anything require changing.

Domain Portfolio Consolidation
Using your own management spreadsheet such as this may mean you will not wish to consolidate your portfolio under a single registrar - but if you are going to, this information will help things go a lot smoother for you.

It’s best to use registrars you know, and are familiar with, but consider the following points when establishing which registrar to use, and during the transfer process:

1) Use a registrar that will not charge you for transferring names away from their management.
2) Use a registrar where you can easily unlock the name yourself and retrieve the authorisation codes for your names.
3) For a portfolio with many names, find a registrar that allows you to do bulk updates on your portfolio instead of having to make the same changes for names one by one.
4) Update your domain management spreadsheet with any and all changes during the transfer process. Remember for gTLDs the current expiration date will extend by one year at the time of transfer.
5) Sort your management sheet to plan your consilidation; do this by expiration date so that you can prioritise your transfers by the names which are expiring soonest, and by registrar so you can move all names away from one registrar at a time. If your current registrar changes for transfers away, negotiate a lower price for doing all names at once.

Useful Links:
Whois lookups: xwhois, iwhois, uwhois
Norid: Domain Registries around the World - find links to registries around the world - useful for finding whois lookups for various ccTLDs.
Domain Cleanup: ohashi.us
DIG lookup for finding resource records on your names: kloth.net, DNS-Stuff

Technorati Tags: Domain Names, Domain Management, Domain Tools

25 March 2007 | Domain Names | Comments