When it comes to registering and maintaining our domain names there are several things we can and should do to protect them.
- Use a reputable company and never use your hosting provider to register your domain name. When choosing a company, you want one that supports and ideally includes privacy as a option. There are many great and trustworthy companies out there. I personally use name.com. If you use the coupon privacyplease you can get free privacy from them.
- Register your domain with an email address that is not on the domain you are registering, this way if you lose access to the domain you can recover it. I suggest creating a mailbox just for domain registrations (or an alias) that never gets used for anything else. I like to use protonmail since they are an encrypted mail service based in Switzerland and take privacy very seriously. Also make sure that this is a monitored address and that you update this with your registrar if you change addresses.
- Make sure that your contact information is current and valid with your registrar. ICANN requires you to verify your information and keep it current.
Our domain should be considered equivalent to our brand and should be protected at all costs.