ICANN, the governing body of all domain names, has instituted a new policy that effects just about all domain names. They are cracking down on domain name owners who don't keep up to date contact information for their domains by sending out verification emails to the registered owners. The thing is, if you don't respond to these emails within 15 days of it being sent, your domain name will be suspended and your site will subsequently be down.

Does this effect you?

If you own a domain name, the short answer is Yes. Typically, you will be required to verify the contact information under the following conditions...

- You recently registered a new domain name.
- You recently transferred a domain name.
- You made changes to the contact information for your domain name.
- Your domain name has never been verified before.

Having your site go down at all is never good, but what could be worse is the potential damage done to your Search Engine ranking. If Google attempts to crawl your website during this downtime, you could have your site completely removed from the search index. Getting that position back is not easy.

What do you need to do?

So, enough of the doom and gloom, right? The good news is, it's easy to avoid all of these problems. You simply need to log in to your WebStarts account dashboard and ensure that the email address you have listed under your domain name Registration Info is one that you can access. Please take a look at the following steps to verify and edit your information…

Step 1_ Click the ‘Manage Domains’ tab from within your account dashboard.

Step 2_ Under the 'Domain Names' heading, click the Pencil icon next to the domain name you wish to edit the registration information for.

Step 3_ Click the 'Edit Registration Info' link to view the current domain registration information.

Step 4_ Edit each field as required, making sure to save your changes by clicking the ‘Update’ button.

Once these changes have been made, be on the look out for the verification email. It will be going out to the email address you provided almost instantly. Also, and this is important, be sure to add 'support@webstarts.com' to your contact list in your email account as that will ensure that this email doesn't end up in your Spam or Bulk folder. Once you get the email, click the link provided to verify and you are all set.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to give us a call at 1-800-805-0920 or email us at support@webstarts.com