Domains

Your domain is the only part of your online setup that is genuinely irreplaceable. You can move hosting, change email provider and rebuild the website, and your customers will not notice. Lose the name and every card, van, invoice and Google result you have ever paid for stops pointing at you.

Whose name is it in?

Which is why the first thing worth checking is whose name it is registered in. A surprising number of Irish businesses find the answer is a web designer they fell out with in 2016, or an ex-employee, or a company that no longer exists. It is not usually malice. Somebody registered it on your behalf, using their own details, and nobody thought about it again. Sorting that out is straightforward while everyone is still on speaking terms and genuinely painful when they are not.

Registering and transferring

Registering a new one takes a couple of minutes. A .ie now needs a real connection to Ireland rather than the old paperwork exercise, and I handle that end of it. If you are choosing between extensions, the short version is: take the .ie if you sell to Ireland, take the .com as well if the name is worth protecting, and do not bother buying twelve variations nobody will ever type.

Transferring one in from another registrar is a job I do rather than a set of instructions I send you. It does not interrupt your email or your website when it is sequenced properly, and sequencing it properly is the whole trick.

Renewals nobody has to remember

After that it is mostly about renewals not being missed. Domains lapse on Sundays, on holidays, and on the card that expired last year. Yours sit in one account under the business name, with the renewals watched, so the answer to “when is it due” is never “let me try to remember who set it up”.