What are your website details?

Where do you store your important website details?

The types of details I’m referring to are:

• Where did you register your domain name? And when will it expire?
• Who hosts your website? And when will it expire?
• And then your SSL certificates, what date does it expire?
• Of course the logins and passwords
• Is the credit card expiration date on your accounts still valid or did it expire?
• Have you changed your email address since you built your website?  Every web hosting company will warn you when your expiration date approaching expiration, but if you no longer use that email, you will not see those reminders.

If the answer to any of these questions are stored on one or more Post-It notes, you may have a problem.

You need to know the answers to all of the questions above.  I’ve seen people’s websites vanish and the number one reason the website vanishes is that the Credit Card has expired, so the website does not auto-renewed. I realize people get busy, clients set up their websites and forget about them.

Please, please do not use an email accessed from your web hosting as the email to renew that account.  For example on my account: PathwayWebDesigns.com, I do not use Irene@PathwayWebDesigns.com as the main email on that account.  Many web hosting companies will now prevent it, but please for your own sake don’t do it.  I tend to add two emails to these important types of accounts.  So if one fails, it is very likely that the other email will still continue to work.

And then to make things even more challenging, there are spammers trying to trick you into thinking that they are one of your providers and try to get you to pay them.  So please be aware that every email related to your website is hoping that you might not remember and they can trick you into you obtaining you as a client or tricking you to give away valuable information.  I’ve seen people fall for these tricks and end up paying a renewal for a service that wasn’t even due to be paid to the wrong company.

Set up a folder, spreadsheet or binder with this information, even put a reminder in the Reminders app and mark it in your calendar.  And definitely store the emails and passwords needed to access the information.  By being prepared you’ll have an excellent defense against people trying to trick you.

#pathwaywebdesigns