Websites Domains. YOU MUST LISTEN TO THIS.
Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 37. This episode is gonna be about domains, and when I say domains, I mean website domains. Uh, so let's jump right in. So the reason I'm doing this episode is because we had a business owner reach out a few weeks ago with a major issue in their domain. And basically what happened was they bought their business from somebody else and the domain expired.
They didn't have access to their domain. When I asked them for the username and password to their domain registrar, so I can log into their domain and fix the issue, they didn't know anything about that registrar. And they sent me a picture of a check from a company called Domain Registry Services and I thought in my head, uh oh, you just got scammed. So take a listen to this episode. It's five minutes, maybe even less. And I promise you, if you learn nothing, no problem. If you learn anything from this episode, it will save you a ton of time in the future and it's just worth the listen. It's something that nobody talks about cause to be honest, it's just not sexy. But let's jump into it. So what is a domain? A domain is your web address. So in that could be material retail.com, shops.com, uh, elliots closet.com, whatever it is, a place where customers go on the internet to get to your website.
A lot of people confuse domain registry and website hosting. A website host is someone like us Material Retail or someone like Shopify or, or Wicks or there's a variety of other ones out there. It's basically where you build your website. A domain registrar is basically where you buy your domain from your domain name and where you keep it locked up so nobody else can take that domain. Um, so the most popular ones are GoDaddy. You have Google Domains, you even have Shopify and Wicks and Square, and a lot of those websites double as domain registrars as well. Make sure you understand the distinction between a domain registrar and a website host. Again, a domain registrar is where you buy and hold the name of your website. And a website host is where you build your website. Website hosts, you can lose them and it's not a problem. You just rebuild your website. Website domains. If you lose it and someone else happens to grab it, you'll never get that again. So keep that in mind. Now, one of the most important things I wanna say is keep it safe. So keep it safe means two things. Number one, make sure that you and only you or you know, the person managing your business or business partner have access to that domain. Registrar. Make sure that domain registrar is on a secure,
In a secure place. So again, GoDaddy, Google Domains, blue Host, Shopify, someone like that. Don't go after some small website that you never heard of, um, just cuz you're gonna save a few dollars. These domains should cost, you know, 10, $20 a year. Um, and they're just super cheap and super simple. Uh, if you are confused, just go to godaddy.com. They have great support and they're a great, great company. Now again, keep it safe, keep your account safe. Two factor authentication. If they let you do three factor authentication, do it. You're not gonna need to log in there often when you do need to log in there, make sure you need a code to get texted to you or a code to get emailed to you so that you and only you can log in there. Don't share this username and password to anybody. Don't give it out to anybody unless you really trust them.
And that's one thing. The second thing you need to do is you can't let your domain name expire. So the way that these domains work is that you buy the domain name for a certain period of time and then it gets released into the wild and someone else can buy it. So you have two options here. You can either have it set to auto-renew with your credit card on file, or you could just buy it for an extended period of time. Most of these domain registrars will let you buy it for 10 years at a time. And again, it's not expensive, it's maybe $20 a year and they'll get big discounts. If you wanna buy it for 10 years, it'll be $20 for the first year. Buy it for 10 years, 110 bucks. And if you do that once, you never have to worry about it, don't, the only thing you have to worry about is making sure that nobody hacks your account, which if you have two factor authentication and you just check your email, you won't really have to worry about it.
The last thing I wanna talk about is don't get scammed. So there's a lot of scams out there, a lot of phishing, a lot of things out there that will try to get you to either pay them or get them to, or get you to give them your domain information. Just don't get scammed. Understand that anytime you ever need to make any change in your domain or anytime you need to pay for your domain, or anytime you need to do anything to do with your domain, anything at all, you're going to that website that you bought the domain from. So if you bought your domain from GoDaddy, you only deal with GoDaddy. And guess what? If GoDaddy calls you, you hang up the phone, go on godaddy.com and call their main number. You do not get scammed, you do not get fish, you'll get a, every business has got a letter in the mail from Domain Registry Services telling you your domain's gonna expire. If you don't pay $225, don't do it. Go on godaddy.com, check your domain, make sure everything looks good and just move on with your life. So that's it. I understand if I was a little bit passionate about that one, but I hate when small businesses get screwed over a little bit by these simple things. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out directly to elliot@materialretail.com. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to the next episode. Thanks so much for listening.
