The flower shop down the road run by a 60-year-old couple doesn’t have to renew its street address. People have been going to the shop for years, and as long as they’re in business, everybody will know where to go.

The same is not true for websites. Miss your domain renewal date, and if you’re lucky you have 30 days to save your little spot on the net. If you don’t renew in 30 days, your domain us unlocked from the registrar and set free. Meaning, anybody can claim your potential customers, clients, and traffic.

Unfortunately, loosing traffic isn’t always the biggest problem. Many owners of pornographic ‘adult’ websites buy up expired domain names. They then direct traffic to their websites. So, the innocent flower shop that decided to go digital is now “Horny Henry’s Online Funhouse.”

So how do “they” find out a domain is expired? It’s a very simple thing to do. For one, there are many stand-alone applications that will download the latest expirations. Others use online tools such as iNet Interactive’s Deleted Domains service. (http://www.deleteddomains.com). As I’m writing this, Deleted Domains reports that a whopping 22 million domains that have been deleted to date.

Though the example I give about the flower shop is fictitious, situations arise that are very similar quite often. In order to combat the disputes over domain names, ICANN (http://icann.org) created the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, or UDRP.

The policy serves as an international guide for resolving domain disputes. The policy only governs .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, and .org TLDs. Nominet manages other TLDs, such as .uk. (http://www.nominet.org.uk/)

A recent case by Nominet involves Google’s Froogle domain. Visit http://www.w3reports.com/index.php?itemid=307 for more information

It’s one thing to loose a domain name that’s expired. It’s even worse to loose a domain name that’s registered to you! Make sure your domain registrar has enabled “Registrar Lock”. This will prevent unauthorized transfers of your domain name. If you want to see if your domain is locked, check out WHOIS. (http://whois.net)

Another common mistake made is forgetting to register your domain in multiple TLDs. Own your domain, if possible, in the .com and .net TLD. Those are the most common, and most valuable. If and when it comes time to sell your website, you’ll thank yourself.