What You Must Know regarding Global Domain Registrations

More than once we have heard this regret from companies; "If We had just registered our Global Domain Names before our brand got known." When your brand is well known, surely opportunistic cybersquatters will register your rightful domains. Therefore register your global domain names in time, and do it before any trademark application, as applications are made public and are widely used as "inspiration" for cybersquatters.

It is ok to just register your local country code domain and .com when you start out. However for companies planning to expand internationally, you need to register the global domains on beforehand.

Before doing any global domain name registration here are 3 essential tips that you should follow:

1. The registrant of your global domains should be your company, and registrant name should be the exact company name stated in the business registration certificate

Web designers registering domains for their clients in their own name is a typical case, so they would actually show up as the owner of their clients´ trademarked domains. When the client finally realises this some years later, then they have already stopped working with the web designer, and it is not easy to change registrant data by then. Also make sure that the global domain names are not in the name of an employee.

The Russian administration has just requested that all .RU registrants need to show a business registration certificate to prove ownership. If the document is not valid, the .RU domains will be deleted. China requested the same documents for .CN in the fall of 2009 after registering 15 million .CN domains without any requirements. The French hostmaster will reject .FR domains some months after their registration if the data is not correct - without any notice.

So make sure that the registrant name is the complete company name as stated in the business registration certificate.

2. Make sure the registrant contact email is non-personal and also active in 5 years from now

You wouldn´t believe how often the domain manager in companies are replaced! Mostly the contact email for a global domain name is the one of the contact person in the company, but will this person stay in the company forever, and if the person leaves, will someone make sure that his emails are forwarded? In most cases the answer is no and no.
Any country hostmaster depends on the contact email when communicating with the domain owner. However this is minor stuff. Imagine instead the following scenario: You - John - have used the email john@abc.com as contact to register all domains for your company ABC. ABC changes at one point name to ABC123. All employees now use the new email so John´s email is john@abc123.com. abc.com is not used anymore, however imagine that the domain was not renewed, and a 3rd party re-registers it. The new registrant can then recreate the contact email john@abc.com and basically administer and change owner details for any of the old global domain names, where this email was used as contact.

So use an email like domains@ which should always be active, and make sure to double check if you decide to let old international domain names expire.
3. Decide upon using registrar DNS or own DNS when submitting an order
When making a global domain name registration you need to decide between using our DNS or your own DNS. Changing DNS after a global domain name has a cost. We recommend clients to use our DNS as full management is included. When you register global domain extensions the new domain will be redirected instantly to your website. Furthermore you can simply create a MX record pointing to your hosting server if you wish to create emails for the new domain.

I hope you have avoided some future headaches with this advice. Below you can check availability for all global domain extensions - yes, all +300 global domain names !