Domain Management and Acquisition
Internet domains are virtual properties on the Internet that reflect our unique brand.
Acquiring, managing, and renewing domains is a normal part of managing your company's presence on the Internet; failing to maintain annual ICANN requests or renew a domain means your website and email would stop working, and you run the risk of losing that intellectual property tied to your marketing.
Because of that, there's a bunch of incentive to interrupt these processes and to seize control of your property. Robot squatters can swoop-in, grab your domain, and extort your company so it can be returned to you. Further, you'll receive fraudulent notices in physical mail telling you that you must renew your domain with another registrar, whose intention is to also extort money from you. Finally, the data surrounding the domain's registration is technical and vulnerable to outside hackers looking to change the way your website works or how email routes.
I want to protect my clients and ensure no disruptions in their service. This is why I’ve started offering a Domain Management service to my clients this year.
Under this service, I assume administrative and technical responsibility for my client's domain. My services:
Monitor the domain renewal process on behalf of my client;
Pass domain renewals through my own invoicing;
Allow me to become a single point of contact for managing the domain as an asset, to help remove the complexity of technical issues involving the Zone File with web developers and others who rely upon it;
Allow me to become a gatekeeper so that I can deflect attacks to prey upon my client’s domains and to avoid the risk of DNS scams;
Setup privacy controls and restrictions that shield the personal private information of my client's from attacks;
Manage MX, SPF, and DKIM records essential to my client's security and experience with Google Apps;
Secure the name server to prevent DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and brute force password attacks against my client’s own accounts.
The big benefit here is that I become a trusted custodian and guardian of my client's Internet presence.
My pricing is very straight forward: $15/year/domain - annual renewals pass through my invoicing.
That’s it.
Not bad for a professionally-managed service, and admittedly, not a lot of money it for me. Still, I’m doing this because I have a vested interest in my clients.
I’ve seen when domain Zone Files get hijacked; when companies get extorted out of thousands of dollars; when mail stops routing because of a technical error introduced by a web vendor; when a company’s owner or officer becomes the victim of a fraudster. It’s ugly, and I don’t want it to happen to anybody that I work with. I’m not looking to make a ton of money here; just perform a technical administrative task that’s increasingly at risk.
If you’re interested in this service, just let me know. I can give you a call, talk you through the process, and we can set a date to perform the technical steps necessary to assume control of the domain before it expires. If I do my work right, there’ll be absolutely no impact on your website or email routing.
