These days, most companies have at least a decent investment in their website, if not a sizeable one. So it’s important to make sure that your investment is protected from potential loss.

Over the years, one of the most common ways we’ve seen companies run into trouble with their website is to allow the contact information for their domain name to become outdated. If your domain registrar doesn’t have a valid email address on file you could have some problems down the line.

The best case scenario is that your domain expires because you didn’t receive your renewal notices, and your website goes down temporarily until it is renewed. Depending on your registrar, your domain could already be considered to be in the “redemption period” by the time you realize it is down, which could cost you hundreds of dollars to recover it. The worst case scenario is that you don’t realize your site is down (maybe you don’t use it for email) and your domain is actually deleted. If that happens your domain could be registered by someone else and you would lose all the marketing time and money that went into promoting it.

There are a few simple things you can do to avoid any problems with your domain:

1. Update the email address that your registrar has on file any time you change your email address.
2. Set your domain to auto-renew using a credit card that your registrar will keep on file.
3. Make sure that you are listed as the registrant for the domain, not your webmaster or your hosting company.

You have a lot invested in your domain name and website, so take a few minutes to follow these simple steps to protect your investment!

This morning we came to work to find out that our Internet connection was DOWN. Now, it’s pretty hard to work without a connection when your BUSINESS involves developing websites (we do lots of hosting as well, but all of our mail servers and web servers are in world class data centers that generally never go down).

So we called Time Warner, only to discover that they were doing “maintenance.” WHAT!!?? Maintenance during the work week that interupts your connection? What ever happened to the concept of doing maintenance during “off hours” so you don’t inconvenience your customers? When I worked in the radio industry and we had to take a transmitter offline for maintenance, we’d schedule it at midnight and work through the night so we didn’t inconvenience the majority of our listeners. Most companies would never think of taking their servers down in the middle of the day for the same reason. But Time Warner? Right smack in the middle of the day. Wow.

When I asked the technician if there was a way for him to get a comment up the “food chain” so that the powers that be got the message that this was a bad idea, I was told that he had no way of submitting customer comments. Wow again. So I asked him for an email address that I could send a comment to, only to be told that there was not even a mechanism in place to do that! Wow, wow, and wow.

So the question is, does Time Warner even CARE about their customers? I believe there are plenty of good, caring people that work for Time Warner. But as a corporate entity, I think the obvious answer is NO!

Welcome to the new eSolutions blog. Here we will feature discussions on hosting, development, design and maybe a rant or two. We hope you enjoy it and will contribute to our topics.