It is critically important that your business email is listed as the ‘registrant contact’ on the ownership records for all of your domains.

• Best practice - eg. admin@yourcompany.com.au

• Bad practice - the email of the provider you use to register domains on your behalf. eg. contact@regionalrising.com.au.

All communication flows electronically through the registrant contact email address, including payment renewal notices and transfer requests.

You can check that your email address is used for the registrant contact email address at https://whois.auda.org.au/

It is human nature to register domain names and then forget about them. If you have a provider to help you but uses their email address “to save time” it can become a problem in the future (some years later) if you no longer have a relationship but need their help promptly.

What to do next:

• Check the registrant contact email on your domains belongs to you and not your provider

• Check that you (your business) is listed as the registrant (which is the actual owner of the asset) and not your provider or someone else. This is especially important to remember if a business changes hands and the domain is still registered to ‘Former Owner Pty Ltd’. There is a fee of approximately $80 issued by auDA (the Australian domain authority) for every domain ownership change so it is best to get this right at the time of registering a domain and not later.

Use a shared mailbox such as ‘admin’, ‘sales’, ‘accounts’ and so on that is monitored, and can be accessed by more than one person. Avoid using firstname.lastname@yourcompany.com.au.

Why this is important:

Individuals come and go in business and the last thing you want is the most important domain name in the business registered to tony@yourcompany.com.au. This becomes problematic if Tony leaves the company and important email notifications for your strategically important domain names are missed because they are still being sent to a mailbox that has been closed down.

Example: Imagine if the credit card you have linked to your domain name account expires (or is cancelled by you due to fraudulent use, which is increasingly common these days). ‘Payment failure’ email notifications to the registrant contact address at the time of renewal will not be delivered and the domain would expire. This could impact the bottom line of your business if you host a website, online store and email services on the domain. This bad situation can be fixed within days but it would mean liaising with your domain registrar and the peak body auDA to remedy it, and the solution will take longer if “tony@yourcompany.com.au” is the email address in auDA’s database. A website and email outage would have a financial and reputational impact on your business, not to mention all those customer emails to you bouncing back to them as ‘undeliverable’. There’s an easy fix - get your records right from the beginning and check them periodically to ensure they’re still up-to-date.

By using a key shared mailbox which will outlive