As a domain reseller, you know how important it is to provide your customers with reliable and secure domain services. You want to ensure that their online presences are protected from hackers, spammers, and cybercriminals who may try to steal their data, hijack their domains, or damage their reputation. Your range of security products should definitely include domain protection services such as Registry Lock!

We Offer an Extensive Range of Security Products

With CentralNic Reseller, you can easily offer your customers products related to the security of domains and websites. We provide you with a range of premium products and features that help you safeguard your customers’ privacy and security online. Our service offering includes for example SSL Certificates, TMCH Services, and domain blocking services such as GlobalBlock or AdultBlock.

In this blog article, we would like to introduce you to the domain protection option Registry Lock and the advantages you and your clients can benefit from.

What Is Registry Lock?

Registry Lock enables you to apply a high-level security feature that protects your customers’ domains from unapproved modifications, owner changes, transfers, accidental drops, internal errors, or fraud.

Registry Lock prevents any attempt of domain configuration unless a multi-factor authentication process has been completed. All changes that are to be made to a domain name must be confirmed by the domain holder, for example by telephone call or fax. Only the registrar’s employees acting on the domain holder’s instruction, and authorized by the responsible registry, are allowed to update a domain secured by a Registry Lock.

Do You Really Need It?

In August 2013, the nameservers of the NYTimes.com domain name were altered by hackers. They gained access to The New York Times’ DNS (Domain Name System) records by compromising its domain name provider and changed the DNS records to point to systems in Syria and Moscow. NYTimes.com was unavailable for several hours. The average NYTimes.com article gets about 8 million views and sales in 2017 reached over $1.6 billion. Registry Lock would have prevented this hack from taking place since the name server update had not been possible without a confirmation by authorized people.

Although this incident happened several years ago, it is still an excellent case study to illustrate the importance of protecting domains from illegal modifications. And today such threats have not diminished – on the contrary!

Domain names are extremely valuable digital assets of a business. A loss through a domain hijacking incident for example may have an immediate and global impact on the revenue and reputation of the domain owner or the company. Even if a domain name has minimal monetary value, it can generate enormous revenue. Loss of control over a domain name can lead to a breach of data protection laws such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which are closely monitored and carry severe penalties.

So, you see, additional domain protection makes sense for all domains and is even a necessity in the case of high value domain names such as e-commerce websites, major brands, websites of governments, banks, and universities, or, more generally spoken, companies and organizations with a high reputation.

Your Benefits as a Registry Lock Reseller

With the Registry Lock service, you add the highest level of domain name protection services to your offerings. It allows you to build trust with your customers and provide them with a very senseful and valuable service. By reselling this service to your customers, you can generate higher revenues by charging an additional fee for the administration (setting up, changing, or removing) of the Registry Lock.

You can activate the Registry Lock service for over 50 TLDs (Top Level Domains) across six registries via our CentralNic Reseller platform. We offer competitive pricing, allowing you to apply a healthy margin and make money! Our advanced system enables an easy integration of the service into your system and since CentralNic Reseller provides you with the widest range of TLDs available for Registry Lock on the market you can stand out from your competitors.

We take over the administrative overhead of implementing a Registry Lock at registry level for you. Our Support team is well trained to process your Registry Lock requests and our preapproved team members are fully trusted at the registry level. Account managers are available to you if you have questions regarding Registry Lock and how to resell the service to your customers. CentralNic Reseller is the ultimate solution for your domain name reselling needs!

Important Aspects You Should Know

So far, we have explained the many advantages of this service, but there are also facts that should not go unmentioned. Like all modifications, urgent updates must go through the same authentication process, which you should be aware of. In the event of such an urgent update, e.g. the replacement of domain name servers on a Friday afternoon, valuable time may pass before the change can be processed. Besides, a Registry Lock is relatively expensive and can exceed the cost of registering a domain name. However, as stated in the case study above, compared to the loss of revenue, the damage to reputation and the cost of recovering a hijacked domain name, the cost of a Registry Lock is almost negligible.

In addition or alternatively to a Registry Lock, there is also the option of setting a so-called EPP status at registrar level to prevent certain domain name updates. This is also referred to as Registrar Lock, free of charge and can be set and removed in real-time either via API or Control Panel. Examples of such EPP statuses are clientDeleteProhibited and clientTransferProhibited. These statuses indicate that it is not possible to delete/transfer the domain name which can prevent unauthorized deletions/transfers resulting from hijacking and/or fraud. If you do want to delete/transfer your domain, you must first remove the respective status codes. However, Registry Lock offers a higher level of protection because of the additional authentication process at registry level.

Conclusion

With the Registry Lock service from CentralNic Reseller, you can provide your customers with the best domain protection solution available on the market. Registry Lock is an easy-to-integrate, high margin security and brand protection product that prevent domains from unapproved modifications, internal errors, or fraud.

When reselling this service to your customers, you can enjoy in addition the advantages of working with a trusted and experienced partner that offers you flexible pricing, simple integration, reliable support, and comprehensive documentation & test environment.