This would be a good time to do a much needed domain name portfolio audit.
As most of you know today is the last day to renew your .com domains before Verisign increases the wholesale price tomorrow.
Verisign will increase the annual registry-level wholesale fee for each new and renewal .com domain name registration from $7.85 to $8.39, effective Sept. 1, 2021.
Here are a few things I do every 3-4 months (I did these all before the price increase and saved a few money on transfers/renewals):
- I consolidate domain names I win at expired auctions to my favorite registrars. I use 2-3 registrars at any time for my portfolio but each extension I invest into is located in no more than 1 registrar.
- I renew my best domains for up to 9 years in advance. I have explained why I do this here. I don’t do the full 10 years in case I want to transfer my domains to another registrar I will not lose the transfer fees. So because I do this anyway I renewed my best 100+ domains now until 2029-2030.
- I also did all my other renewals for domains expiring until the end of the year so I can focus more into selling. I don’t use the auto-renew option because of a few reasons I will explain in another post.
- I checked that all nameservers of my domains (especially the newly acquired ones) point to where they are supposed to: domain sales landers, parking landers, developed websites, forwarding to developed websites, etc.
- I checked all whois info is correct. That is especially important for the newly consolidated domains and also for all domains I manage for my clients. (web development, web hosting, domain management). Even if you use whois privacy it is important to have a valid email address connected with your domains.
- I checked all the domains that point to (or are listed into) Dan, Efty, Afternic and the parking companies are all listed in my account.
- I also checked if I have any domains that I have sold still listed for sale in any of the platforms I use and deleted them.
- Finally I checked parking stats and google analytics to detect any significant changes and patterns.
Did I miss something? Let me know.