Having seen every possible error in domain registration and management, it’s worth listing out the errors and best practices.
1. Register the domain yourself. You need to be the owner of record of the domain. Otherwise, you don’t own it. Period.
2. Use only registrars directly licensed by ICANN (you can look this up if any question). Otherwise you really don’t know WHO you are registering your domain with.
3. Make sure that your correct email address is listed. Registrars will notify you, usually multiple times starting 90 days before a domain expires, so you know to pay for another year.
4. Register for one year at a time. You can pay for multiple years but I don’t recommend it. Are you sure you’ll have the same email address 10 years from now? Remember your password or where you wrote it down?
5. Have another notification email going to someone else you can trust. With our clients we make sure we are the “admin” contact. We also get notified when a URL registration is up for renewal. That’s enabled us many times to prevent a registration from expiring.
6. That your URL is up for renewal is publicly available information, so you can expect to get emails and letters from OTHER domain registrars pretending to be your registrar to try to get you to switch your registration to them.
So know who you are actually registered with.
7. If your registration does expire, your website will be taken down, usually immediately. You will, however, have a grace period of 45 days or less before anyone else can buy the domain name and during which you can still renew it.