Why domain names are the most important part of your digital infrastructure
What is your ‘digital real estate,’ you may ask, and why should you care about it? Well, it’s made up of things like your social media handles, email addresses, and most importantly, the address of your website – a.k.a. your domain name. These are the monikers that allow your end users to find you online. If you don’t maintain these, you run the very real prospect of not only losing them, but also risk damaging your reputation.
TLDR: Not maintaining your domain names, email addresses etc can have a very detrimental outcome on your organisation; here’s why and how to ensure it doesn’t happen to you.
So, why is it important to protect your digital real estate?
The bottom line is, if you don’t control these items, someone else will. Maintaining ownership of these things is incredibly important, as your domain name is the entry point to your web assets and emails, both of which are critical to your organisation. Any disruption to these – either through benign negligence or via more nefarious actions/actors – comes with significant risk and the potential to cause loss of time, cost or both.
Your domain name is something that identifies your organisation online. The more closely connected it is to your brand, the easier it is for people to find you, whether that be by typing your web address or using a search engine. Losing access to it could cause (sometimes) irreparable damage to your reputation, something we’ll go into a bit more detail on later. This could occur through forgetting to renew your domain, losing access to the account, or even through unauthorised actions from a third party.
We highly recommend that organisations take ownership of their domains in-house, as this will enable you to both maintain them and keep track of their status. We also provide domain monitoring for our clients as part of our Bureau+ service – these are some monitoring services available that we use to help us when undertaking this work:
- updown.io is a simple and cost-effective app that provides basic alerts to remind you of when your domain renewal is approaching. It’s priced by how much you use and has integrations with email, Slack and Teams.
- OhDear.app has more in-depth features for domain monitoring than updown.io, but comes with a higher price tag. You can monitor your website’s performance, discover broken links, improve SEO and customer experiences, as well as managing incidents and protecting your brand. The alerts it gives can tell you if your records have been modified, allowing you to react quickly should they have been changed without your knowledge or permission.
Why losing your domain name isn’t worth the risk
There are some nefarious people (some more than others) out there who want to get hold of your domain name or email addresses to use them for scams or to exploit your users. At best, if you lose access to your domain, you might lose it to a domain squatter and find yourself having to pay for more than it’s worth to retrieve it. At worst, there are some bad actors that would use it to do a number of things:
- They might set up a rogue website using your legitimate domain name. This would allow them to masquerade as you; however, they could take advantage of your users by posing as an organisation they trust and exploit them.
- They may use your domain name to redirect users to a clone of your website, opening them up to malware, spam or cryptocurrency bots.
- They could gain access to and disrupt your email system, potentially intercepting your own emails to pose as you. This would allow them to authorise actions without your permission and could very negatively affect your brand.
- They could use your email accounts to spam users – this can have a negative effect on your organisation’s email trust score, which would affect your own marketing activities and have an impact on your funding success.
Once a bad actor has some access to your website or email accounts, it becomes much easier for them to gain access to more. If this happens, the knock on effect could have dire consequences for your organisation.
How to protect your domain name and other digital assets
We’ve previously discussed using a password manager to maintain your organisation’s key credentials. This is imperative, as more manual means of storing your account details come with many risks, both from within your team and externally. Using a password manager means that only trusted individuals have access to the logins they require, and access can be revoked when necessary. Your domain name’s account and registration details should be stored within a password manager to ensure they aren’t lost. It’s also highly important to use two-factor authentication (2FA) switched on when logging into your accounts, as it will assist in preventing any unlawful attempts to access your domain.
Some domain registrars offer logins for multiple people to access your account. This is an incredibly useful feature – and should be switched on, if available – as it means that, should the main person responsible for the domain leave the organisation, they’re unavailable for some reason, or are locked out of the account, it’s still accessible to others to be able to recover it. Registrars also have a ‘domain locking’ feature that should be enabled to prevent any unauthorised modifications or transfers to your domain.
As a precaution in-house, we highly recommend you implement a documented process for what should happen to a domain if the responsible member of staff leaves. It should include which company the domain name is registered with, where to find the account credentials, how to change the password to the account, and how to revoke access from the previous staff member and reassign it to whomever is taking ownership of it. Having this step-by-step in place will mean you can maintain your domain’s integrity and keep it secure. The .Gov website has some useful guidance on this and other elements of domain stewardship.
Conclusion
Although it may seem like a very small aspect of your ‘digital real estate’ and your business, your domain name is incredibly important. It holds a lot of power, both for your end-users and your reputation. Protecting it should be a high priority for all organisations, but especially for charities and non-profits, as it comes with great bearing on your reputation. All it takes is a bit of forward planning and putting some robust processes in place. It’s worth it when you think of what could happen if you don’t!
