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Caution that bill may be just an advertisement.

The practice is not new, but there are domain-registering companies who routinely send out a document to the domain name owner, that appears as a bill to re-register your web name.

It is their way of having you transfer the registration of your web address from your current register to them. In some ways this may not be a bad thing, because at least it’ll give you an idea when your domain name needs to be renewed. However most times their cost is much greater than what you may already be paying.

If you don’t remember, or you don’t know because someone else set up your registration and that person is no longer associated with you, that’s just sloppy record-keeping.

However it wouldn’t surprise me that this may be more common than not.

Questions to ask?
Do you know what names are registered? Have you just registered as .com? Did you also register as .net and/or .org?
If not someone else may have registered one of those and are using you to drum up business for them. This may not be that important for those who use .com as their Top Level Domain (TLD). But for those who use .org or .net, just remember that many people will automatically type .com. And if part of your business is supplying information, you may want to look at getting a .info TLD.

Do you know with which domain-registering company you originally registered the domain?
Domain Registration and Domain Hosting are not the same thing. And for many these two aren’t held by the same company. It’s your Domain Registrar that tells the Internet where to look for you.

Do you know when your registration expires?
Once it expires, the registrar will send the url to a default location. If not renewed, it’s free to be registered by another party. There is a grace period, but during that time it’s not displaying your site. Can you afford to have it down for the time it takes to bring it back?

This is just another of those things that can, but shouldn’t fall into an unknown crack in how you do business.

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