Why it’s important to renew your domain name?

If you don’t renew your expired domain name, it will lapse and become available for anyone else to register.

If you lost your domain name, what would happen?

• You would need to change your domain name which would have an impact on your brand and where customers can find your information online.
• If you sell goods online then customers wouldn’t be able to find your shop.
• You would need to change your domain name and completely rebuild your search engine ranking which would undoubtedly mean losing customers and revenue.
• You would need to change all of your email addresses.
• You could lose orders and enquiries sent by email.
• You could lose contact with friends and colleagues.
• Many services use your email address as your login name e.g. banking. You would therefore be unable to log into your accounts or even request an email password reminder.

Even worse than that, when a domain name is not renewed, it is available to be re-registered by anyone else. Statistics show that 15% of non renewed domain names are re-registered by someone else within one day. Astonishingly 7.5% are re-registered within 10 seconds. This means that someone else would be receiving all of your existing web site traffic and would benefit from the search engine rankings associated with your domain name.

If you do not renew your domain name, you lose your web site identity. Whether personal or business, having to change your email address is a serious inconvenience. You could lose contact with friends and colleagues or lose customers as their enquiries or email orders are not delivered to you.

Third-level Domain

A third-level domain is the next highest level in the domain name hierarchy below the second level domain and the segment that appears directly to the left of the second level domain.

Domain names are names that uniquely identifies a site (e.g., a web site or ftp site) on the Internet or other TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol) networks and serve as user-friendly substitutes for difficult-to-remember, numeric IP addresses.

A second-level domain is the portion of a domain name directly below the top level domain (TLD) in the domain name system (DNS) hierarchy and the portion that appears immediately to the left of the TLD. The TLD is the last part of the domain name, that is, the segment furthest to the right, such as .com, .org and .edu, or the two segments furthest to the right if a two-letter country code (ccTLDs) is also used.

For example, the www in www.was.org is a third-level domain. .org is a top level domain and was is a second-level domain. The www would still be the third-level domain even if it were the fourth segment of the domain name because of the addition of a ccTLD, for example www.was.com.my.

The third level domain is typically used to refer to a specific server within an organization. In larger organizations each division or department might have its own third level domain, which can serve as an effective means for identifying it. www is the default third-level domain name and the most common by far.

Extending the above example, if was.com had an FTP (file transfer protocol) server for allowing users to download files, its third-level domain name could be called ftp and its full domain name would be ftp.was.com. Likewise, the domain names support.was.org and members.was.org could be used to distinguish support services and member services provided by was.com and to direct web traffic accordingly.

Multiple third-level domain names are also used for the purpose of load balancing (i.e., allocating traffic among identical servers at the same location) for sites that receive a large amount of traffic. Sometimes names such as www1 and www2 are used for this purpose.

Third-level domain names are not required. Thus, it would be possible to have a fully functional domain name such as was.org. All that is required is two levels: the TLD and a second-level domain name. However, the use of third-level domain names can usually add clarity to domain names and make them more user-friendly.

Third level domains should not be confused with the part of e-mail addresses that appears to the left of the at symbol. Thus, for example, the support in support@was.org is not a third level domain, but rather is merely a specific addressee or mailbox at an Internet address.

Domain Name Registry

A domain name registry, is a database of all domain names registered in a top-level domain. A registry operator, also called a Network Information Center (NIC), is the part of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet that keeps the database of domain names, and generates the zone files which convert domain names to IP addresses. Each NIC is an organisation that manages the registration of Domain names within the top-level domains for which it is responsible, controls the policies of domain name allocation, and technically operates its top-level domain. It is potentially distinct from a domain name registrar.

Domain names are managed under a hierarchy headed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which manages the top of the DNS tree by administrating the data in the root nameservers.