A real phone call I received: “I built a website five years ago with some guy. He disappeared, the site went down, and now it turns out the domain is registered in his name and he’s unreachable. What do we do?”

The painful answer: almost nothing. The address the business spent five years building - reputation, business cards, car decals - simply wasn’t theirs.

Let’s make sure that never happens to you.

What is a domain, and why is it the real asset?

The domain is your business address on the internet: your-business.co.il. Crucially, it is separate from the website itself: the site is the house, the domain is the plot address and the signpost. You can demolish the house and rebuild; but lose the address, and you lose everyone who knew how to reach it.

Every link pointing at you, every business card, all the reputation accumulated on Google - all built on the domain. A website can be rebuilt in a month. A lost domain sometimes never comes back.

Five golden rules

1. The domain is registered to you. Period

Not to the web developer, not to “the computer guy”, not to your nephew. To you or your company, in an account you control. It is perfectly fine for a professional to register it for you - as long as the registration itself is in your name and the credentials are yours.

2. Auto-renew on + a valid credit card

An unrenewed domain gets released to the market. Traders lie in wait for exactly these, buy them the moment they drop, and offer them back at thousands. The fix: auto-renew enabled, plus a reminder to update an expiring card.

3. Pick a name that survives being said out loud

The real test of a domain is the phone test: you say it to a customer, they type it. If you have to spell it out, you pay a price on every call. Short, no hyphens if possible, no creative spellings.

4. co.il, com, or both?

For a local Israeli business, co.il is excellent and signals local credibility. If the name is free on com too, buy both (another hundred shekels a year) and redirect. No competitor or copycat squats on your name.

5. Access = digital inheritance

Make sure you know: which registrar holds the domain, what the username is, and which recovery email it points to. Keep it somewhere orderly. Businesses have lost domains simply because the recovery email belonged to an employee who left.

Bottom line

The domain is the land your digital business is built on, and neglecting it is one of the most expensive mistakes there is - not because it costs money now, but because it costs everything later. Five minutes of checking today (whose name? when does it renew? do I have access?) prevents the story this post opened with.

Not sure where your domain stands, or need help with an orderly ownership transfer? Happy to help, no strings attached ↗