Especially in a hurting economy, we need to protect our own valuable assets from domain theives, which have seen a lot of in these past few months. With that in mind, we must consider that there are a couple of things we can do to protect our domains, and ensure that we don’t see as many domain thefts as we have in the past few months. Keep in mind that this is only Part I of this article, so this will be focusing on the basics of domaining safely, but are things of key importance to remember.

Passwords

One of the most important things you can do not only in domaining, but in your everyday life as well, is choose passwords for your accounts that even someone whose close to you would never be able to guess, and keep them a secret. A lot of domain thefts have been due to theives hacking into GoDaddy, or other registrars accounts of other users. You need to pick passwords that won’t be guessed by anyone at all.

Forums

A lot of domaining is done over the forums. You need to be more alert on some forums more then others. The three main domaining forums are DNForum.com, NamePros.com, and Forums.DigitalPoint.com. Forums.DigitalPoint.com is definitely where the most scammers hang around, and are indirectly allowed to hang around. You should always be very alert when domaining there. NamePros is for the most part a very clean, respected forum. And I think that is a result of its caring, dedicated management. But it is a free forum, so keep in mind, any new scammer could join there for free, and steal a domain, free of charge basically. DNForum is definitely the safest I would say. Despite the recent theft that took place there, it’s a forum where you must pay money to join. So scammers will tend to stick around other free forums rather then paying to steal domains.

Conclusion to Part I

Well, as you can see, this was rather short, but these are two key, basic tips to domain safely. Stay tuned for Part II where I will go more in depth and provide a few more detailed ideas that are very important for all domainers to keep in mind. Anyways, I would love to hear any comments you all have, so be sure to submit them below!