Names are rarely lost to someone outbidding you. They are lost to an expired card, an email nobody read, and a renewal notice that went to an address that stopped existing. All of it is preventable in about twenty minutes, once.
The domain
Four things, in order of how badly it goes when you skip them.
- Turn on auto-renew, and check the card on file is one that will still be valid next year. This is the single most common way a domain is lost.
- Use a contact address that isn't on the domain itself. If the domain lapses, mail to it may stop working — which is exactly when the warnings arrive.
- Turn on registrar lock. It's usually on by default and it blocks unauthorised transfers. Confirm rather than assume.
- Register for more than a year. Multi-year registration is cheap and removes several chances to forget.
If you read the guide on expiring domains, you know how long the recovery process is and what it costs once you're past the grace period. Avoiding that entirely is worth the twenty minutes.
The handles
Handles don't expire, but accounts can be lost and inactive ones can in principle be reclaimed.
- Turn on two-factor authentication on every account holding a name you care about. A stolen account is a stolen handle.
- Post something occasionally on the platforms you're not using. A single post makes an account visibly not abandoned.
- Keep the recovery email and phone current. This is the one people discover is wrong at the worst possible moment.
- Don't leave a handle on an account tied to a personal address someone else controls, or to a phone number you'll change.
Defensive registrations worth the money
Not many. The ones that earn their renewal:
- The .com, if you took something else. It is the one people will type by mistake, and you would rather it wasn't a competitor's.
- The obvious misspelling — one, not twelve. The one people actually make when they hear the name.
- The plural or singular, whichever you didn't take.
Point all of them at the real domain with permanent redirects. Beyond that, the returns fall off fast: buying dozens of extensions is a well-marketed way to spend money on names nobody will ever type.
Keep a record
One document listing where the domain is registered, what the account is, which email owns each handle, and where the two-factor recovery codes live. Somewhere a second person can reach it if you can't.
This sounds like overkill for a side project right up until the moment someone needs to renew a domain and nobody knows which registrar it's at.
Check the set again in a year
New platforms appear, and the handle you'd want on them is free until it isn't. Running the name through a check once a year takes a minute and occasionally catches something worth claiming while it's still there.