Your web address is only yours until it lapses
Let a domain expire and someone else can buy it — and filling a dead business's old address with machine-written pages now costs next to nothing. Meanwhile, fake "your domain is expiring" notices are fishing for exactly the owners who aren't sure. Both have the same fix.
Most small business owners think of their web address the way they think of their shop’s street number: it’s just where they are.
It isn’t. A web address is rented, a year or two at a time. Miss the renewal — because the card on file expired, because the reminder went to an old email, because the person who set it up left — and after a short grace period, anyone can buy it.
That has always been true. What has changed is what happens next.
What a lapsed address is worth now
An old business domain is valuable to the wrong people for a simple reason: the internet still points at it. Directory listings, old reviews, social posts, links from local news, the address printed on a thousand business cards and the side of a van. Search engines remember it, too.
Whoever buys it inherits all of that.
The biggest search engine considers this common enough to have a name for it in its published spam rules: “expired domain abuse” — buying a lapsed domain to borrow the trust it built up, and filling it with something else entirely.
That “something else” used to take effort. It doesn’t now. Filling a site with dozens of plausible pages — your old business name, your old town, generic advice, a few links to wherever the new owner makes money — is the kind of job generative tools do in an afternoon.
So a customer who finds your old address on a fridge magnet, or a two-year-old review, can land on a page that uses your name and isn’t you. At best it’s nonsense. At worst it’s selling something, or collecting something.
The other half: the fake reminder
Here is the cruel twist. Because people half-know their domain can lapse, scammers send fake reminders.
In June, a security firm documented one of these in detail. An email warns that your domain is about to expire. The link leads to a page that shows your real public domain details — so it looks official — alongside a countdown (“expires in 03 days”) and a cut-price offer of €2.00, reduced from €9.99, valid for fifteen minutes. Click “Renew Now” and nothing is renewed: the pages collect your name, address, phone and email, and then ask for your card.
Variations arrive by post as well, as official-looking letters with a payment slip.
The firm’s advice is the line worth keeping: “Treat urgency as a warning sign, not a reason to hurry.”
One fix for both
Notice that both problems come from the same gap: not being sure who looks after your domain, or when it renews.
Close that gap and both go away. If you know exactly where your domain lives, and it renews automatically from a card that works, a lapse can’t happen — and a reminder from anywhere else is obviously fake.
If you’re closing, moving or rebranding
The riskiest moment is when a business changes. You close, retire, merge, or switch to a new name — and the old domain quietly stops mattering to you.
It still matters to everyone else. Every old link and printed card still points there. Letting it lapse hands that audience to whoever buys it next.
The cheap, kind thing to do is keep it for a few more years and leave a single, honest page: “We closed in March 2026. Thank you for twelve years.” Or: “We’re now called [new name] — find us at our new address.” A renewal is a small price for making sure nobody else gets to speak in your name.
The fair question
devkoi builds the site that lives at your address. It doesn’t renew domains from inside a chat, and it can’t stop anyone sending you a fake notice.
If your domain is connected through devkoi, the portal is where your sites, domains and billing live — so that is the one place to check, rather than any link that arrives in an email.
What to do this week
1. Find out where your domain actually lives. Which company is it registered with, and whose account is it in? If the answer is “the person who built our old website”, fix that first.
2. Check the renewal date and turn on automatic renewal. And make sure the card on file hasn’t expired — that is the most common way a domain is lost.
3. Make sure the renewal emails reach someone. Update the contact email on the account to one that is read, not a departed employee’s inbox.
4. Never renew through a link in an email or a letter. Go to your registrar — or your portal — directly, by typing the address. A genuine reminder will be waiting there too.
5. Ignore countdowns. Real renewals don’t come with fifteen-minute discounts.
6. If you’re closing or rebranding, keep the old address. Renew it for a few more years and leave one honest page behind.
“Replace the homepage with a short notice: we closed in March 2026 — thank you to everyone who came in.”
“Add a line to the homepage: we were previously [old name], and this is our new website.”
7. If you’ve already lost an old domain, say so. Tell customers on your current site which address is the real one, so anyone who finds the old one has a way to check.
A web address feels permanent because we print it on things that last. It isn’t; it’s a lease.
The renewal is cheap and the reminder is easy to ignore. That is exactly why it goes wrong — and exactly why five minutes this week is worth it.