The name is the one thing you should never rent from a stranger.
Registration, transfers, recoveries and honest naming advice for South Coast businesses getting online or getting organised.
Should a South Coast business put a town in its domain?
The question we get more than any other, and the answer depends on how far you intend to go.
- A town name helps when the town is the market.
- A Milton cafe, a Mollymook surf school, a shop whose customers are standing outside it. The name matches what people type and where they are.
- A town name hurts when the town is small and your radius is not.
- This is the South Coast specific trap. Put "Ulladulla" in the domain and every customer in Milton, Burrill Lake and Bawley Point quietly assumes you do not come to them, even when you do. In a region of small towns twenty minutes apart, a town name in your domain can shrink your business by four fifths without anyone mentioning it.
- A regional name is safer if you plan to grow
- , and it is also more contested, so the good ones went years ago and the ones left are usually awkward.
The rules that never change either way: get the .com.au, register it against your own ABN and your own details, and keep the renewal notice going to an inbox you will still have in three years.
Everything a domain needs across its life.
New registrations, put in your name from the outset and never in ours. Transfers away from old providers, old developers and old business partners, including the difficult ones. Renewals managed so a missed email never takes your website and your email down together. And DNS changes made carefully with a rollback ready, because one wrong record can silently stop your mail for days before anybody notices.
We also do recoveries: the domain registered a decade ago by a nephew, a defunct agency or an account nobody can get into. The earlier you start that, the cheaper and more likely it stays.
The questions behind half our first meetings.
Domain trouble is how a lot of businesses first end up talking to us.
Someone already has the domain with our business name.+
First we find out who holds it, because surprisingly often it is a lapsed registration that can be picked up cheaply. If it is genuinely gone we help you find a variant customers can still type and search engines can still connect to you, rather than something nobody will remember.
Do we need more than one domain name?+
Usually one good .com.au, occasionally plus the .au or an obvious misspelling. Buying a portfolio of keyword domains "for Google" stopped working a long time ago, and we would rather tell you that than invoice you for twelve renewals a year.
Our email runs on the domain. What stops working if it lapses?+
Everything at once. Website down, email bouncing, and after the grace period the name can be picked up by anybody at all, including a competitor. This is why renewal management is the least interesting and most important thing on this page.
Can we move the domain without the site going down?+
Yes. A transfer and a change of hosting are two separate jobs and they can be done in either order. Done properly the public never sees a gap. Done in a hurry on a Friday afternoon they sometimes do, which is why we do not do that.
The other seven, and why one supplier holds all of them.
The rest of what we look after, on the same number and the same invoice.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.