If you receive an email from GoDaddy saying the following:
Double-check your domain contact info.
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, requires us to ask you to review and update your details for the following domain(s)
You should definitely take the time to do this. It’s required by ICANN to verify domain ownership every so often. I once had a client lose their domain name temporarily because they ignored these emails.
Make sure your address and contact info is correct and go through the steps required.
This also helps you because when your domain names expire, you want to make sure you get notified so you can renew them. We have probably 4-5 clients a year where their domain name expires and their website goes down because they didn’t receive the email notification that their domain name was expiring.
Tips and Advice
- Make sure the email isn’t a phishing email.
- Check the email sender’s address – not just the name but check which email address it came from. It should be a godaddy.com account like accountupdate@godaddy.com.
- In my email, I can hover my mouse over the link to see where it’s going. That should be a domain name that ends with godaddy.com. Scammers will try to put something like godaddy.com in the middle of the domain (something like this, for example: register.godaddy.com.domain-verification.com) but you must see godaddy.com at the end.
If it looks suspicious and like phishing, I have a way to help protect your computer and network from phishing scams.
- As you do this, make sure you can login to the GoDaddy account where you have the domain name. And make sure you’ll have future access to that account. Often, clients that lose access to their domains have their domain name set up in an account of an employee who has left the company.
Have the domain account owner’s email be something like info@yourdomain.com (using your actual domain, of course) or the owner of the company’s email address. Store that login information on paper, next to other important documents for the company like the incorporation documents. Yes, it’s that important.
The worst situation to end up in is where you didn’t get the notification emails (they went to spam or an email address that no longer exists) and then you can’t get access to your account because your domain has been shut off, which also shuts off your email, leaving you not able to login to your account since you don’t have the username or password on file.
I’ve seen that happen many times.
That information is vital to your business, so make sure you’ve stored that info. Even check when your domain expires and mark that on your calendar a few days before so you can renew it even if you don’t receive the emails for some reason.
It’s also best to renew domain names for as long as possible – like 10 years. That’s better for SEO because you’re signaling to Google that you’re in it for the long haul and that the domain won’t just be down one day in the near future (which would be a bad result for Google to send someone to).
