A lot of website owners have had to wake up one day to find out that their website is gone with all its data. They either can’t get in touch with their website developer, or their website development agency does not provide additional support or helpful information like Branditechture does.
Another reason could be that they are not subscribed to a website maintenance plan, thereby missing out on personalized notifications and advice on important events like hosting and domain renewal dates and fees.
Even if you are not subscribed to any website maintenance plan, we would still (voluntarily) provide you with enough alerts and assistance, so that losing your website is completely up to you.
Domain and Hosting are two different things, and they can expire at different periods depending on your billing cycle.
A billing cycle starts the day a domain or hosting is purchased or renewed.
For example, it is possible to purchase or renew a domain first, and then purchase a website hosting plan months later in order for a website to be built on it. As you would expect, this would automatically result in the domain and hosting plan having a different expiry date.
Ok. What is domain and hosting renewal?
The lifecycle of gTLDs (or Top Level Domains e.g .com, .ng, .net)
The day your domain name expires, it begins quite a process that makes it available to be repurchased by someone else, as demonstrated in this infographic from icann.org.
If your domain expires, it would become available for someone else to purchase after the grace period (or restoration period) elapses. This period typically lasts 35 days, and our domain registrars and partners would charge a penalty fee on top of your renewal fee if you allow your domain to enter that stage before deciding to renew it.
Websites are hosted on the cloud by hosting companies. Think of your website as a house. That house is sitting on rented land and you pay rent each year (hosting renewal fee). Similarly, your website sits on a rented space in the cloud (hosting plan), the rented space is managed by a web hosting company and they work to ensure the smooth running and 24/7 availability of your website and Webmail accounts. When you don’t pay for hosting renewal, all these privileges would be seized.
What happens if I don’t renew my domain?
1. Your domain becomes available to someone else to purchase.
As mentioned earlier, your domain would become available to someone else to purchase as theirs. If someone else ever buys the domain before you finally decide to renew it, you will have to settle for another domain name (No two people can purchase the same domain name). Now, consider the stress of updating all your marketing materials (both online and offline), social media profiles and promotional posts, including every other place you may have posted your former web address.
2. Your website URL would no longer resolve.
This simply means that your website would no longer be reachable, (as seen in the photo above). So it will not load due to the domain name’s inability to resolve and point to your hosting server.
3. Your website SEO rank starts to drop drastically.
Since your website is no longer reachable, it also becomes unreachable to users clicking on it in (Google, Bing, and Yandex) search results. The continuous unavailability of your website automatically sends a bad signal to search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, etc, resulting in a drastic drop as each day passes by.
Since search engines tidy up their result pages to remove websites that are no longer reachable, yours would be removed as well.
If you eventually decide to renew the domain after the grace period elapses, you will face two challenges;
- Someone else may have purchased the domain to claim as their own, making it unavailable to you. The person may however decide to sell it back to you, usually at a very price.
- Your search engine rank would be back to square one and you will have to start your search engine ranking efforts from scratch.
To avoid all these issues, it is far more beneficial to renew your domain name (and hosting) on time.
What happens if I don’t renew my hosting?
- All your business email accounts ( or Webmail) would stop working and would be deleted after a grace period of 7 days.
- All your website files would be deleted from the host server after the 7-day grace period and you would have to build a new website again.
We understand that renewing your domain and hosting plan may come at a period of financial difficulty, so we do try our best to help in ways that we can. We can help you by taking a full backup of your website prior to the expiry date and advice you on how to manage the situation.
What are the costs involved?
The total cost of renewing your hosting and domain would be mailed to you as part of the information on each reminder.
