Your domain and hosting for your website is the backbone of your online presence. It is why server UPTIME is an important factor when deciding on where to host your website. Your website is supposed to work for you 24/7/365. Time offline is potential loss of business. While every server needs to go offline every now and then, the steps taken on the back end can usually minimize that time to only a few minutes. If I could make one recommendation to every single business owner, it would be to ALWAYS set your domain and hosting renewals to AUTOPAY, so that you never have to worry about going offline for missed payment.
Most of my clients who do websites through CNYMM have hosting and domains registered through the agency and I take care of paying the renewals and then invoice the client for those fees with a very small service fee added on. This allows me to make sure that the site does not go offline unless that is what is explicitly intended for the client. Most domains only cost about $10-$20 per year, and typical serviced hosting plans average about $250 per year – so to neglect that kind of expense in the big picture for something that is of critical importance for your business is very simply a bad idea. If you host with a big company (godaddy, bluehost, etc.), set you account to autorenew and remember to update your credit card information when the information changes. It will save you a lot of headaches down the road.
I have a client who had their domain and hosting expire this last month (registered and hosted through an outside provider). It appeared on my site dashboard as disconnected, so I brought the issue to their attention. Unfortunately, the site was not restored until almost a full month later and the original site files that were restored were not intact. The hosting company does not make regular site backups for their hosted websites – or they might do this for an additional fee. (Our server at CNYMM does backups every 24 hours in case there is any kind of catastrophic failure – a site can be restored with all content and function from the day prior. We do not charge an additional fee for this.) Most of the content still exists thankfully, but it will take time to get the site back up and running with full design and function. So – one more time… (say it with me!) …ALWAYS set your domain and hosting renewals to AUTOPAY.