Will your domain name soon be the equivalent of your registered head office?

If Minister De Croo manages to push through his plan, your e-mail address will equal your registered head office. So, make sure you have your own reliable domain by then rather than some iffy solution that could let you down tomorrow or next month!

We at Combell no longer need to be convinced of the importance of online presence for a company, preferably via its own domain. Having your own website has become a must for a while now, regardless of the size of your company. The least you can have is a page where you keep your contact information, your opening hours and the phone number and e-mail address on which your company can be reached. Hopefully you have taken things one step further though, and you own a full-blown website to show off your products or services, share links to your social network pages (Twitter, Facebook and the like), and perhaps even host an online store.

Furthermore, such an online presence should not be chosen lightly: it is your digital address, an online location where Internet users can find your company for as long as it exists. It thus stands to reason that the best you can do is work with your own domain – not an unprofessional looking address like http://users.provider.be/~yourcompany. Be it a domain on a classical .be gTLD, one that emphasizes your relationship with new geographic extensions like for instance .vlaanderen, .brussels or .gent or one that sports one of the numerous new extensions like .guru, .top, .law, .immo ... it doesn’t matter, as long as you have your own domain, your own identity on the Internet where customers can always find you. If you are with one or the other provider or run your own servers, you will always be able to fall back on your own domain name.

Soon, there will probably be another reason for choosing to have your own domain name. New Minister of Digital Agenda, Telecom and Postal services Alexander De Croo indeed wants to have the e-mail address of companies and self-employed entrepreneurs recognized. With the motto “Digital is the new normal”, he claims that the e-mail address should have the same legal status as the physical address of a registered head office.

We will not argue with him, and you probably will not either. So, if you do not have your own domain name yet, this message will probably get you thinking (and acting on it!) ...