Domain

A domain is the address under which your website can be reached: the part you read out over the phone and put on the van. Technically it translates a name into the number of a server, so that nobody has to memorise strings of digits. For you as a business it is above all one thing: the only part of your presence customers are meant to know by heart.

Its structure is read from the back. On the far right sits the ending, in the jargon the top level domain — .de, .com, .eu or one of the newer ones such as .shop. In front of it stands the name you choose. What comes before that, the familiar www or shop for instance, is a subdivision you set yourself and which costs nothing.

The point most people get wrong: a domain is not bought but rented. You register it through a provider with the responsible registry and pay an annual fee, usually in single-digit euros. If it is not renewed, it becomes free again after a grace period — and can be taken by anyone else. That is exactly how businesses lose addresses that have been on their vehicles for ten years.

Even more important than the renewal is the question of who is entered in the register as the holder. If your agency is named there instead of your company, the address does not belong to you — and changing provider becomes a negotiation rather than a procedure. This is not a rare exception but one of the most common unpleasant surprises when switching. The background is set out in Who owns my website and in vendor lock-in.

When choosing the name there are two schools of thought. One takes the company name, the other builds in the service, windows-munich for instance. Both work, and the days when a search term in the address by itself brought positions are over. What decides in practice are plainer things: short enough to remember, spellable over the phone, no risk of confusion with an existing name, and no third-party trade mark in it.

As for the ending, for German businesses with German customers it is usually .de. It is established in the market, and visitors type it automatically when unsure. A .com is worth it if you really do work internationally. We have yet to see a business benefit from a whole collection of additional endings all pointing at the same page — they cost money every year and bring no extra visitor.

The domain normally survives every rebuild. When you have the website built anew, the address stays and only the content behind it changes — provided the old subaddresses are redirected to the new ones. If that does not happen, the visibility built up over years collapses, and old references from other sites run into nothing. How this proceeds in an orderly fashion is set out in the guide to relaunching.

For you that means: check once who your domain is registered to and when it is renewed. Put the access details somewhere you will still find them in five years, and store a billing address that will still be valid then. That is half an hour's work. It spares you the most unpleasant case in this area: having to buy your own address back from somebody who took it after it expired.