In this era of smart spending, many organizations are evaluating every expense – including domain names. Sure, domains are dirt cheap through many services these days, but if you have a few domain names, and you buy several extensions to each, you’re eventually spending real money.

So, how important is it to maintain the renewals? As with many things in life, “it depends.” In this case, the root questions we can turn to are:

1) Is there a potential impact to your brand if the domain that lapses falls into the hands of a competitor or other site you’d rather not be associated with?

2) If that happened, what would be the cost? That includes the impact on your brand, legal fees, time that could have been spent on proactive efforts, etc.

3) Most importantly, is the savings now worth the risk of what might happen later?

Chances are that makes it a simple question.

The only real gray area is which extensions are important. You’re going to find many differing opinions on which matter, but here’s our take:

The “no brainers” to protect:

• .com
• .net
• .org

For key domain names, consider also:

• .biz
• .info

And if you do business in other countries (or think you might someday):

• reserve the relevant country extensions as well

The next most commonly asked question is – what about .mobi? Personally, I don’t see it taking off. Technology now enables a site to adapt itself to the browser, which is much more elegant (read: user friendly) than forcing people to learn a new domain extension. A quick check of some popular sites reveals even in highly competitive markets, few companies have bothered to reserve a .mobi domain.

If you are interested in doing everything you can be to protect your sites’ domain name (just owning it isn’t always enough!), see also: http://www.circleid.com/posts/help_domain_name_hijacked/.

Also, please note that there are some good ways to maintain the domain names in your organization that you should think about before things get too messy!

Tags: Branding, domain name renewal, Domain Names