Quinn DonovanAt the beginning of last year, ICANN (the governing body for a number of domain extensions, including .COM, .NET, .ORG and a number of new gTLDs) and a number of law enforcement agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom made a few changes.
These resulted in the creation of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement or RAA. What this entails is that you, as the registrant, are required to keep the information for your domain registration up to date at all times, as you would with any issued government document such as a driver’s license or identification card.
While many have commented both positively and negatively about this, ICANN made it a requirement at the end of 2014. This meant that anytime a new .COM, .NET, .ORG or any gTLD domains were registered, the details of the registrant needs to be verified (most country-code domains are exempt from this as they have separate governing bodies).
The verification is usually performed by sending an email to the administrative email address on file for the domain name. The email itself will contain a simple link to click on, which takes you to a screen that will show and allow you to confirm your information.
In the case of a new domain name, failure to verify your identify will result in a domain name remaining inactive until the procedure is complete. In the case of a registrant change (contact update), the verification must be completed or the domain name will be deactivated.
So why does this matter to you, the customer?
If you use services such as web hosting or email, it matters quite a lot. The deactivation of your domain name for any reason can cause you to lose emails, customers and having to troubleshoot issues during your already busy workdays.
In a report conducted by The Radicati Group, the average email user receives 91 emails or more during a single day of work and any type of email loss or website downtime can be devastating to any small business.
So, how can you stay on top of this as a Registrant?
Well, the biggest thing that we can say is CYE or Check Your Email
Now most of you are saying “I do this anyway”.
This is excellent to hear because any time that you update your information in your Webnames.ca account, we will send an email to verify it. From there, it takes less than a minute to perform the verification. It’s that simple.
If you don’t receive the email, you can alternatively call us at 1-866-221-7878 and let us know. From there, we can perform a phone verification in order to verify your information.
We usually do this within 3 days, but it never hurts to be proactive. After all, no one likes the lights to be turned off when they are working on something and the same is true for your web hosting and email accounts.
Now you may be asking, “What happens if my information changes completely and you can’t reach me?” In that case, we will need to send some paperwork to you that will allow us to verify you via the inclusion of supporting documentation.
From there we can easily update the information on the account, and send you the verification email. To avoid the paperwork situation, if you get the heads-up that your email or address details will change, send an email to support@webnames.ca from your current email address, and we’ll be happy to update it for you.
In the end, it allows your information on file to stay updated, your domain and any associated services to continue to work uninterrupted, and allows you to not have to add to the list of things that you already deal with on a regular basis during your workday, which is ultimately a very good thing.