VICTORIA, BC – Imagine this: it’s Tuesday morning, and you learn that customer emails are bouncing, your team can’t send emails, and your website is down. What would you do?
Your domain name is effectively the phone number for your website. Whether it’s a .ca, a .com, or dot whatever, if you have control of it, you decide where your web traffic lands. But if you lose your domain, you lose control of everything connected to your online presence. Emails, web traffic, and anything else connected to your domain might stop working.
You lease a domain from a domain registrar. If you don’t know who your registrar is, you can find it with a Whois lookup:
- For .ca domains: www.cira.ca/en/ca-domains/whois/
- For everything else: lookup.icann.org/en
These lookups tell you who your registrar is, when your domain was registered and when it expires, and often information about your webhost.
For SummitBusinessNews.ca – we can see:
- Creation date: 2026-07-07T19:41:05Z
- Expiry date: 2028-07-07T19:41:05Z
- Registrar name: GoDaddy Domains Canada, Inc
- DNS hostname: ns1.hosting-nation.net
This shows a new domain (congrats Josh and team!) registered via GoDaddy and hosted by Hosting Nation (nice to see you chose a BC business!)
What happens if you miss your domain renewal?
The timeline varies from less than a few weeks after expiry to up to 70 days. Don’t risk it.
- Expiry. Your site and email can stop working immediately. Nobody warns your customers.
- Grace period. You can still renew the domain, sometimes with a late fee. Your domain may be auctioned off during this period.
- Redemption. The domain is dead and can’t be edited, but you may still recover it — for a significant fee on top of the renewal.
- Released. Back on the open market where anyone can register it. An online casino overseas or your competitor.
3 Tips to protect your control of your domain
- Don’t use your domain email as your recovery email. If you lose access to yourdomain.com, then emails sent to you@yourdomain.com won’t work.
- Know when your domain expires and enable auto-renew. Make sure the card on file is active and current. Pay attention to emails from your registrar.
- Have someone to call when things go sideways or choose a hosting company that offers managed services.
Your domain is a critical asset for your business. Don’t lose it because you forgot to update your credit card information.
Jason Finnerty is the owner of Time2GetOnline.com – a local web development service offering managed WordPress hosting to small/medium businesses throughout BC.
