A Little Warning.
This is for those new people at WA who have been with us for just over a year.
If you have set your domains for your site at auto-renew then everything should be fine as long as there is money in your account on the due date.
However, for those of you who prefer not to auto-renew, please be warned.
Because your domain can be hijacked by places like GoDaddy and sold to the highest bidder to another interested party.
Which is what happened to me. I used to have 2 websites - the second one being about affiliate marketing. It had no visitors, but looked good. It only had 34 posts.
However, I took a breather for a couple of months and when I came back, my second site was being auctioned by GoDaddy for $800 and I lost access to it. I had not renewed my domain.
Now, when I look out for my affiliate marketing site on GoDaddy, there is a broker fee for $51 and my domain is 'taken'.
So what am I trying to say? If you don't want to lose your hard-earned work, please pay attention to your domain and auto-renew so that if you take some time away, you still have access to your site when you come back.
Don't let what happened to me happen to you - okay?!!
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Yes, I still want to see how much it will cost to get my site back...Not that I want to pay thousands of dollars for it though!
The same thing happened to me in 2006. I had a site on Hostgater that I lost because I had major surgery. It was an active site with authority. The asking price was $26,000!
My oh my - $26,000!!
The funny thing is that when building out a site, we have no idea how much other people think our site is worth until something like this happens.
I wish there was a way of knowing how much are sites are worth as we build them out.
Hope you've recovered a made money since then Glen!
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If you are keen on keeping your domains, leave them on auto-renew so you don't have to worry about them expiring. But yeah, once a domain has expired, there's a specific period during which you need to renew it (a month before and a month after) - you'll receive multiple notifications. However, it isn't the registrar's responsibility if you do not respond if auto-renew is switched off.