Comment by simne
5 years ago
The main question if you want to defend from technical issues or from legal, so measures extremely different.
For tech, just choose some big registar with good reputation, and use all measures, registar recommends, like 2FA, chrypto-keys, etc. For example my friend register his domain on GoDaddy.
For legal issues, it depends on your jurisdiction. For example, in Ukraine we could bye 2nd level domain .ua, if have registered trademark, and process of registration lasts for 2 years.
Mean, you send request to government registration service, that you want to register some name, than they make checks, to ensure nobody use this name, and that not exists some names which very similar (so you will not look associated with Mercedes or some other well known brand), and if all ok, you will receive official registration rights, and after that you could ask to registar .ua name, and it will be associated with your legal entity (I'm not sure, most probably possible register as private person just to your name).
And after that procedure, nobody could steal your domain without stealing your entity. Even if you will once forgot to pay for domain, it will just remain blocked, and nobody else could use it, until end official registration of trademark.
For other domains, like .com or local, things are slightly different, but all very similar, in that if you have registered trademark (same as domain name without suffix), you have legal power to defense. And nearly all hostings respect this power, so in most cases you will not need to call judge, just send to hosting support photo of documents of registered trademark, and hosting will immediately remove site of person, who try to use your registered trademark name.
For technical issues, I know at least one real case: my friend registered domain and created hosting, as private person, and choose automatic recurrent payment from his credit card. All where ok for more than year.
Once, when should made another automatic payment, happens some technical error, so payment transaction where not successful, and provider immediately removed domain and site, so site disappear and domain becomes non-registered and open to anybody.
Fortunately, site/domain where not very important for him, so in a few days he discovered this, and registered same domain on other registar and recreated site from outdated backups.
As I know, many domain registars now offer special service, it named differently, but idea is the same - for very small additional cost (or even free), when domain registration end, it switched to locked for 30 days or something similar, when nobody else could buy domain and reregister it for themselves, so you will have time to fix issues if they happen. Other registars could in such cases call you to all your contacts, and don't turn off domain for a week or more, so similarly, you have time to make payment or to fix technical issues.