Last week, I received lots of mildly misleading emails from Nominet, the UK’s domain registrar, as well as clients who also received these emails looking to me for help. The subject line leads people to believe that their domain is up for renewal but actually the email is just a reminder that their reserved .uk domain is going to be available for general registration soon.
Here’s a extract from the email.
‘If this domain is unfamiliar to you, don’t worry. Fasthosts reserved .UK domains on behalf of their customers as part of our .UK Rights of Registration scheme (https://registrars.nominet.uk/uk-namespace/dot-uk/rights-of-registration). This was to allow you to register the .UK domain name if needed, and you have not been charged for the reservation.’
And an article by Fasthosts that explains this further.
‘If you are the registered owner of a .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk, .net.uk, .plc.uk or .ltd.uk domain, the new .uk equivalent would have been automatically reserved for you when these domain extensions were initially launched on 10 June 2014. This reservation window lasts for 5 years and will end on 25th June 2019.’
That five years is almost up so it’s time to decide whether you want the .uk domain or not. My advice is to buy it if you want to protect your company name or brand and can afford to so – The cost is no more than a regular .co.uk domain – but realise that this is money for nothing. I won’t be registering the ratherinventive.uk domain as I haven’t for all the other domain extensions released over the years.