Domain names 101: registrars, DNS, and what not to let lapse

Your domain name — yourbusiness.com — is the one piece of your online presence that's genuinely hard to replace. Your website can be moved; your email can be moved. But if you lose your domain, customers looking for you will find something else.

The three pieces

It helps to separate three things that often get bundled together:

1. The registrar is the company where your domain is registered and renewed each year — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace Domains, Cloudflare, and so on.
2. DNS is the set of records that says where things go: "the website is over here, email is over there."
3. Hosting is where your website's files actually live.

You can keep your domain at one company, your email at another, and your website at a third. That's normal.

Keep these four things in order

• The account is in your name. Your business email, your login. Not a former employee's or a web designer's.
• Auto-renew is on. Expired domains can be snapped up by others within days.
• The card on file is current. Auto-renew does nothing if the payment fails.
• You know the login. Store it in a password manager.

What happens when you move your website

When you move your site to new hosting, you don't move your domain. You update a couple of DNS records at your registrar so your web address points to the new home. Your email records stay exactly as they are.

At Flagstage, we give you the exact records to enter, and we check that they've taken effect before we consider your site moved. Your old site keeps working until the switch, so nothing goes dark in between.

Watch out for scam renewals

Small businesses regularly get official-looking letters and emails warning that their domain is about to expire, asking them to pay a company they've never used. Always renew through your registrar's own website — never through a link in an unexpected message.