When you hired First Arriving to design your website, you may already have had your own URL, or you may have had First Arriving purchase it for you.
If First Arriving Purchased Your Domain for You
The domain is registered via our Godaddy account. We will pay for the renewals for you. If you ever (gasp!) leave us, we can transfer your domain into a Godaddy account that you own, or we can arrange to transfer the domain to another registrar of your choosing.
If You Purchased Your Own Domain
You may have purchased your URL from any number of registrar companies. Please continue to pay for those renewals directly. Here are a couple pieces of advice:
- Connect your account to a generic billing email address that your company owns, such as billing@yourdomain.com. That way, if the person who operates that address leaves your company, you will still have access. It's a good idea for more than one person to monitor this address. The address should probably not be on the same domain as the one you're trying to maintenance, in case your email service goes down (see next bullet point).
- Load a valid payment method onto your account. A registrar will put your URL into probationary status if it cannot charge your payment method at renewal time. During this period, your website and email service might go down. After the probationary period, if payment still has not been received, the registrar will release your URL into the general marketplace. If someone then buys it up before you do, you will have to negotiate with them to buy it back, and there is no guarantee that will work.
- Public records: If you forgot where you registered your URL, you can look that up on any WHOIS directory (e.g., click here). WHOIS will also show your domain's expiration date, contacts, and where its domain name settings are being served from (its name servers). Note that you domain's name servers might not be at the same company as your registrar.