Domain name renewal!

Embarrassing. Frustrating. Helpless. Dear reader, these were but some of my emotions over the past 3 days as I was powerless to prevent my blog site going down (yes, the very one you are reading right now) due to the simple fact my domain name (web address) charliegunningham.com had expired. 

For 15 years now I’ve been berating clients for not having proper processes in place to know when their domain name would expire, and how to renew it in a timely manner. The number of times we thought something was up at our end when in fact it was the dear client’s fault for being so disorganised. Whoops… ahem… it can happen to the best of us (!)

I only started blogging away at this domain 2 years ago, and the account I bought the domain on points to an email that I no longer have access to, and no longer exists. Hence I did not receive the reminders to renew my domain, and was blissfully unaware of its expiration (about a month ago). Hence, once my grace period was up, down went my site. Well, it was not down really – being a WordPress blog all the details were there, but not at charliegunningham.com. The more embarrassing thing was a well informed and impressive online Canadian entrepreneur pointed it out to me mid week (I had been on the site earlier that day, but in the interim it had been disconnected.)

All good now though – thanks to the fine folks at Aplus.net – who I had to ring in California this morning (7pm last night their time) where a very cool guy sorted it out for me in minutes. I did not have records of my login or password (so password reset was of no use), but I knew what my password was at least – that was enough to verify who I was, so I could pay the $12 to renew the domain, and within a few hours, the site was back live. Phew.

Let this be a lesson to you my fine blogsters and bloggerinis – do you know when your company/personal website address expires, and how to renew it? No? Because not knowing can take your site down, turn your emails off and provoke a plague of locusts. Well, two of those three are accurate.