Ensure that your domain and hosting services continue uninterrupted by logging into the "My Account" area, and performing the following maintenance tasks:

• Verify your security information - be sure that someone else in your organization knows your account username & password, as well as your "Call in PIN." This information will be vital for the continuation of your website if you ever move to another ministry.

• Verify your contact information - incorrect contact information means that we can't contact you, and may be grounds for the termination of your domain name.

• Verify your payment information - if your credit card has expired or is no longer valid, we will email you in an effort to correct the situation. However, it's always best to keep your account information up-to-date.

• Check your auto-renew settings - if your domain expires, it will be held in "redemption" for you before it is released to the public. Save the expenses of buying back your domain by ensuring that it always renews on time.

• Save money by yearly renewals - many of our products cost less when purchased for a year (or more). Consider upgrading your monthly plan to a yearly plan today.

• Consider synchronized billing - you might have a hosting plan that renews in the spring and a domain that renews in the fall. You can use our "Synchronize Billing" feature under the "Renewals" menu to simplify life for your treasurer--and to make sure that you don't overlook a payment.

Labels: account maintenance, renewal

posted by PastorJon @ 9:15 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

Last Friday, I got a piece of mail from a company called "Domain Registry of America." It looked like a bill for the domain renewal of one of my domains. "This is odd," I thought, "since all of my domains are registered through me!"

And then I remembered that one of my clients had emailed me a couple of weeks ago about this very same mailing. They wanted to know if they needed to pay that bill or not.

In reality, this particular piece of mail was not a bill, but an advertisement disguised as a bill. Basically, this company was hoping that I would fill out that thing that looked like a bill, and send my payment to them. In doing so, they would initiate a transfer of my domain, and I would become their customer. Domain Registry of America wanted to charge me $30 for a one year registration for my domain name. That's over $20 more than you would pay to register your name through YourChurchWeb.net.

(You may have seen similar sorts of mailings from all sorts of companies attempting to look like "the Yellow Pages." On closer look, most of those companies are fairly low-traffic online directories that charge exhorbitant rates to be listed with them.)

My point? Be very careful when you hand bills to your church treasurer. They may not recognize a legitimate bill from a solicitation--and you may find yourself agreeing to move your domain name, simply because you paid something that was designed to look like a bill.

Labels: domains, renewal

posted by PastorJon @ 8:43 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

Today I received in the mail a notice that one of my domain names is up for renewal in a couple months. I wanted to share with you a bit about that renewal notice, because there is something important for all of us to be aware of.

Here it is: The mail was not from my registrar - it was from a different company altogether.

The mail was designed to look like a bill - in fact, it even had a place to print my credit card information, and check off how many years I was registering for. But midway down the page there was a notice in the middle of a paragraph: This is not a bill, it is rather an easy means of payment should you decide to renew your domain name with...

In other words, these people are hoping I won't notice that they aren't my registrar, and I'll fill out the form without realizing that I'm actually requesting that my domain name be transferred to a different registrar.

Here's what scares me. I know absolutely nothing about these people, and yet if I fell for their sales pitch, I'd end up giving them my credit card information. This could just as easily be a form of identity theft as it could be a legitimate domain registrar.

Certainly, since the setup of their mailing is designed to fool us, we know that their level of trustworthiness is very low. Would I give them my credit card information?

Absolutely not.

All that aside, they were charging more than twice the price for a domain renewal as I'm paying through YourChurchWeb.

My point in this cautionary tale is this: know who you are doing business with. When you receive mail and email notices regarding your domains and/or hosting plans, pay close attention to make sure you know that they are from the people you are doing business with, and not a scam artist trying to steal your identity, your domain name, or your money.

Labels: domains, privacy, renewal

posted by Douglas Twitchell @ 12:30 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

Once you've settled on a domain name and begun the registration process, you will be provided with a variety of offers which may be useful to you. The purpose of this post is to detail the benefits of each option so you can make an informed decision.

Multiple Domain Names: You may be presented with the opportunity to register additional domain names, sometimes at a discount. Please note that any discounts presented are for the first year of registration only. There may be benefits to registering multiple domain names: helping more people find your site, presenting multiple versions of your site to different groups (teens, college students, members, non-members), and helping those who might frequently misspell your name. While perhaps not as important for churches, businesses will often register multiple versions of their domain name to protect their brand from competition.

Privacy: Before you checkout, you should consider whether or not you wish to register your domain name privately. Since WHOIS records are public, a private registration actually involves a third-party service called Domains By Proxy®. Domains By Proxy® will register your domain for you, protecting your personal information (phone number, address, etc) from the world. While the service does cost $7.95/year, there are some benefits that you should consider. I've seen outside companies attempt to bill churches for their domain in an effort to force a transfer away from YourChurchWeb.net (and charge them $35-50/year in registration fees). I often receive junk mail and spam based on entries in the WHOIS database. And, if you are using your personal address to register your domain(s), you may appreciate the privacy that this service provides.

Renewal Options: I've seen it happen--a church misses a renewal deadline on their domain registration, and all of a sudden their website disappears. Often, the domain can be reinstated, but sometimes there are extra fees for buying the domain back. And sometimes, if you go well beyond the expiration date, another company will buy your domain simply to "squat" on it, and then try to charge you an exorbitant price to purchase the domain back. To prevent that from ever happening, we recommend that you select the "Auto" renewal option for any domains you intend to keep long-term. You will get renewal notices 90-, 60-, and 30- days away from your renewal, so you can always change your status before your payment method is charged. (Besides, auto-renewal doesn't cost you anything! And it will protect your domain name from expiring.)

Certified Domain: Demonstrate that you are who you say you are. A domain certification seal allows a visitor to know that your domain belongs to your church, and that valid contact information was supplied with your domain registration. Cost: $2.99/yr. Do you need it? Probably not...unless you are going to operate a store (although at that point, you'll also need an SSL Certificate), or are concerned that another group is attempting to impersonate your ministry. If your site is going to collect a lot of personal information, it might be important to protect against a potential phishing scam. In which case, this might be a useful add-on for you.

Email: You will be given the opportunity to add email to your domain as well. You do receive a complementary 25MB email address with your domain, (and 500 10MB addresses with your economy hosting package). However, if you want a lot of online email storage, or are not purchasing a standard hosting plan, you might want to purchase an email package to go with your domain. Read more about choosing the email plan that's right for you.

Set Nameservers: If you're hosting your site elsewhere, you can enter the appropriate nameserver information right from the shopping cart. You'll get this information from your webhosting company. If you're hosting your site with us, don't worry about this, you'll take care of it automatically when you setup your hosting space.

Hosting, Quick Blog, or WebSite Tonight® : If you haven't purchased hosting (or another product to go with your domain), you may do so before you check out. While you may "park" your domain for free, you'll eventually need to purchase something that your domain points to: Online Photo Filer, Quick Blog, a WebSite Tonight® account, or a standard hosting account.

Business Registration: You can opt to purchase an enhanced WHOIS listing that is customizable. You can provide links to your website (or particular pages on your site), your church logo, and detailed contact information. While this is a product designed primarily for businesses, you may wish to consider if it will benefit your church's visibility. Once you've registered and paid for your domain, you can do a variety of things with it, including: assigning it to hosting space (or other product), parking it, creating a (free) starter webpage, forwarding it to another website (or a subfolder of another site), or assigning a third-level domain (subdomain) to point to another website or online service.

As you can see, YourChurchWeb.net offers a variety of options to help you customize your domain registration to suit your needs. If you are unsure of which options would be beneficial to you, feel free to send me an email at sales@yourchurchweb.net.

Grace and Peace,

Jonathan Twitchell
YourChurchWeb.net

Labels: domains, privacy, products, renewal

posted by PastorJon @ 7:44 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

In my last article I mentioned the old numbered email addresses that were given to the original CompuServe users. Can you imagine meeting someone who moved to your community, talking about your church, and then telling them your email address--when that email address was a long string of numbers? Aren't you glad you can have an easy to remember email address?

Now, imagine if domain names didn't exist, and instead your website was identified by a long string of numbers and dots, called an Internet Protocal (IP) address. You'd never be able to get the word out about your website--nobody could remember how to find it. While your website still lives on a computer that's identified by its IP address, everyone expects you to have an easy to remember domain name that will help other computers in the world find your webserver.

An essential part of any website or web application is your domain name. Your domain name is the first part of your Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL points to a specific file or resource located on the web. For instance, this blog is located at the URL: http://www.yourchurchblog.net/index.html. The domain name that begins that blog is www.yourchurchblog.net.

A domain name is divided into three parts:

1. Top-level domains (TLDs) refer to the last part of the domain name: .com, .net, .org, etc.
2. Second-level domains refer to the middle part: yourchurchweb, yahoo, msnbc, etc.
3. Third-level domains (commonly called sub-domains) refer to the very first part - www, email, blog, etc. For instance, your email will be accessible at email.yourdomain.com. If you had a blog, you could assign a third-level domain to that folder, so that it appeared at blog.yourdomain.com.

Top-level domains (TLDs) are controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN provides accreditation for registrars, which register domain names to end users. YourChurchWeb.net uses an ICANN accredited registrar for all of your domain purchases.

At YourChurchWeb.net, you register your domain name in the name of your church or ministry. While you register it through us, your church retains ownership over the registration. You can transfer it to another registrar, point it to another web-host, forward it to another domain, or (as most of our customers choose to do) continue to register/renew it through us, and point it at one of our other products (Web Hosting, WebSite Tonight®, Online Photo Filer, Quick Blog, etc.)

Registering a domain is fairly simple--as long as it's available. You'll want to have payment information available when you start your search (I've seen domains get registered by someone else between the time a customer found the available domain and was ready to purchase it). You'll start your search by using our domain search box (either at our home page or in the bottom right corner of this blog. Enter the domain name you're interested in, and see if it's available. If it is, simply choose it and begin to work through the checkout process.

If the domain you want is not available, our program will tell you if it's available in any other TLDs. (For instance, you might not be able to register yourchurchname.org, but yourchurchname.net might be available.) We also have a tool that will suggest other possible domain names for you to consider. You might want to brainstorm with other leaders in your church to see what other names you might consider.

YourChurchWeb.net offers one of the lowest domain registration and renewal rates in the internet industry. I'm always amazed to visit websites of other registrars and see prices like $35 a year, when we offer our domain registrations at $9 a year. And then I stumble across the occasional registrar that doesn't even make their prices publically available. We make our prices available to you before you setup your customer account, so you know what you're getting.

From time-to-time, we may even offer some special pricing on new domains. Promotional and sale pricing will generally only be available for the first year of a new registration, but your renewal rate will be the standard retail price of $8.75/yr (plus an ICANN mandated fee of $0.22/yr). You can't go wrong with registering your domain at YourChurchWeb.net.

Once you've registered and paid for your domain, you can do a variety of things with it, including: assigning it to hosting space (or other product), parking it, creating a (free) starter webpage, forwarding it to another website (or a subfolder of another site), or assigning a third-level domain (subdomain) to point to another website or online service.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about the registration process. I'd also be happy to help you brainstorm a domain name which will work well for your church or Christian ministry.

Grace and Peace,

Jonathan Twitchell
YourChurchWeb.net

Labels: domains, products, renewal

posted by PastorJon @ 7:29 PM 0 Comments Links to this post