How to create and protect your brand identity online

Check the registration of your domain name
When you have picked your hosting company and signed the contract, it is important to check the registration of your domain name if this was part of the set-up process. Sometimes hosting companies register the domain name in their own name rather than in the name of the customer. It is advisable to ensure that the domain name is registered in your name so that the registration is protected if your hosting company should subsequently go out of business, for example.

Protecting brand identity
Once you’ve chosen a web-hosting company, the next step is to protect your identity by making sure that threats of online brand infringements are minimised.

Renew, renew, renew
One of the easiest ways to protect your online brand is to ensure that you keep your domain name registrations up to date. If an organisation fails to renew a domain name before it expires, someone else could capture or hijack it. They could then use the domain name for whatever purpose they choose. Often, if the domain name is well established, a pay-per-click advertising page will appear instead of the original website.
Based on the latest renewals trends, in the next two years alone, over 140,000 .co.uk domains will be reregistered in less than ten seconds after they become available. If you have not renewed the domain name in time, however, there is a real chance you could lose it and spend a lot
of time and resources trying to get it back, or
on rebranding.
There is a quick and easy way of checking if your domain name is about to expire. If you have a .uk domain name, you just need to visit www.keepyour.co.uk and type it in. The site will then respond with the details of when and how you need to renew your domain name.
If you have registered a .com address, it is still advisable to register an address for the local domain where your offices are based. Recent research shows that UK consumers trust websites ending in .uk, seeing them as local and more relevant, and many would expect a UK business to have a .co.uk web address. Registering a number of domain names will also prevent someone else from registering a similar domain name and trading off your brand reputation in a local/regional market.

The risk of cybercrime
Cybersquatting is a significant problem for companies with recognisable brand names. It involves registering, trafficking in or using a domain name with the explicit intent to profit from a brand owner’s goodwill or trademark, by offering to sell the domain name to the brand owner at an inflated price, or making money from internet traffic accidentally landing on their page. The result is that organisations (and individuals) are faced with a choice – protect the brand at potentially significant cost, or accept the infringement.
However, it is not just the threat from cybersquatters to an online brand that organisations should be aware of:

A denial of service attack (DOS)
is an attack, which makes a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. These are generally intended to prevent an internet service from functioning, either temporarily or on a permanent basis. Targets are often high-profile sites, such as banks. The easiest way to protect a business is to have an effective firewall in place. Otherwise, you can risk losing customers as they realise that services are unavailable and look elsewhere to competitors.

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