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Best Practices To Manage Domains

As a part of our OI blog best practice series, we bring you the first in a series of articles about ways you can manage your domain strategically and efficiently. Establishing a few best practices is a great way to ensure your domains aren’t hijacked, expired, or cyber squatted.

Here are three domain management practices that can help minimise domain risk and ensure domain dominance.

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Drop catching Domains

Drop-catching domains is a business threat, here’s how you can stop it

Every day, you read more and more about domain name scams or hijacked domains. We wrote about this in our August OI blog, If you don’t renew, someone else will and provided some easy steps you can take to defend your digital territory, but with domain name scams on the rise, we wanted to double-down on what’s happening out there and how you can protect your domain.

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Three Minutes With Hendrikus van Katwijk

Welcome to our Three Minutes With. From igaming to affiliate publishing, we talk to movers and shakers, breaking boundaries and blazing new trails. Brand Legends Chief Operating Officer (COO) Hendrikus van Katwijk took three minutes to speak with Oken’s content director, Jennifer Kite-Powell, about the importance of search visibility for your brand and the most significant tech shifts that are affecting SEO today and in the future. 

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create a custom domain like a rockstar

So, You Want To Make A Custom Domain Like Will.i.am?

Will.i.am, the multi-talented Black-Eyed Peas artist, has not only created a brand with his name but also a domain that represents his identity and what he stands for. His success inspires us to learn from his experience and follow in his footsteps. Here are four amazing tips to do it like a pro and create a successful brand.
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Three minutes with Okens business development manager, Alexander Kucherenko

Three Minutes With Alexander Kucherenko

Welcome to our new Three Minutes With series, where we talk with movers and shakers in our industry. From igaming to affiliate publishing, we talk to the people out there who are breaking boundaries and blazing new trails. Okens Content Director Jennifer Kite-Powell talked to Alexander Kucherenko, business development at Okens Domains on how he sees his role at Okens – hint: it’s about education and guidance.

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Domain Renewal

Renew It Or Lose It

You know the story. You want a domain. You buy a domain. Just pull out your credit card, and €60 later, you have a global domain. Done. You’re up and running. Your site looks great. Visitors are click, click, clicking. Everyone is happy and time marches on. Then, one morning things turn for the worse. Your domain is being used by another company. All your traffic is going to a new site, and your customers are finding themselves on a site that has no relationship to your brand and is so far from your product offering you’re bordering on massive revenue loss. What happened? Your domain expired and someone else took it. 

If you don’t think it can happen to you, let’s look at the Maryland Department of Transportation Motor Vehicle Association (MVA). The MVA used the site www.starspangled200.org to commemorate the War of 1812 on its state license plates between 2012 and 2016. The site www.starspangled200.org was designed and owned by the War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission in 2007 to raise funds for bicentennial projects and events. But somewhere between 2016, the domain stopped being about the history of the War of 1812 and started being about online casinos in the Philippines. 

A March 2023 Vice article reported that close to 800,000 drivers in Maryland have the starspangled200.org on their license plates. But what they did not know was that over that period of time, that starspangled website stopped being about the War of 1812 and became a website for an online casino in the Philippines at https://www.globeinternational.info/

The article notes that the domain registration information on starspangled200.org had been re-registered and transferred a number of times in the past several years. Today, starspangled.org goes directly to the MVA website and Maryland drivers can safely resume driving without advertising a casino.

How does it affect you? The MVA situation seems an issue that no one would overlook, but it happens. A domain expires, no one renews it and another company takes it over. 

This shows the importance of renewals and the attention that needs to be taken by both the domain user and the registrar company. So, here are four easy steps to prevent your domain from being lost to someone else. 

  • Turn on auto-renew on all your domains
  • Get a gap analysis with Okens on all your domains to find your domain risks
  • Ensure you have worldwide coverage for your domain so no domains are exposed to hackers or thiefs
  • Create a domain line of credit to ensure all your domains renew and are paid for at the same time 

For more information on auto-renew and a domain line of credit, visit Okens 

 

Welcome To The OI Blog

Okens Domains is not new to global domain registration and protection. We’re a leading igaming registrar, we operate in more than 100 countries and we give brands the power to operate their business discretely and securely online.

But what is new is our blog, OI – Okens Insights. We want to create a place to share the latest issues affecting domain registrations and protection. Let’s face it; it takes much more to register your domain than ever – you must protect it from hackers, thieves, and cyber squatters. Then there are the domain spoofers who like to mix up the letters in your domain so it mostly looks like your brand. You have to defend your digital territory more than ever today, and that’s why we created OI – Okens Insights to bring you the latest tips and news to help you get domain dominance.

Subscribe to OI today.