Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Domain Name Review & Check Up

-----Original Message-----
From: TechSoup - Automated Email
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 5:26 PM
Subject: Free Domain Name Review & Check Up
By Christian in Web Building

Techsoup has offered site reviews in the past, but I don't think we have ever offered a review and checkup for the domain name(s) an organization has.

I'm going to offer to provide this on a limited basis and see how it goes. While this could be seen as fishing for business, and I do provide Internet consulting and domain sales, I think there is a real need for organizations to have someone look at their domain name and make sure they are not at risk of losing it due to it containing outdate information or lack of security. My review will cover these main points:

- Do you have a good domain and is it suitable for your mission? If you have a .org domain, are you losing visitors to the sites that may be hosted on the .com or .net versions of your domain? Could someone solicit donations on those other domains and cause confusion for your visitors? Who are your neighbors?

- Is your domain contact information current? Each of your contacts should be different or at least use a different email address under a different domain. If you don't get the renewal emails for your domain, you could lose access to your site and email, and if not renewed, you could lose your domain. Who is listed as the owner of your domain? Is is your org, your ED, your web designer, or your hosting company?

- Is your domain hosted at a good registrar? The yearly fee for most domains should only be between $8 and $12 a year. If you are paying $30 a year you may be a register.com customer and supporting their high profit margin business model.

- Is your domain "locked" and secured against unauthorized transfer or changes? If you have a small, struggling NP this is not going to be a problem, but if you have a larger site with a lot of traffic, it might be.


 
Some domain names for sale that are suitable for non-profit organizations:
airsc.org
andah.org

dirby.org
fania.org
hsby.org
ifch.org

rmcis.org
SearchBy.org
SENBy.org
Spring-Training.org
wJet.org
 

 

 

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