I keep a regular eye on press releases related to domain names – a favourite place is http://www.prweb.com.

Today I saw a release from competitor registrar Moniker.com announcing that all newly registered domain names are automatically locked in the customer’s account and at the domain registry to ensure that only an authorized administrator can transfer those domains.

They also say that if the approved administrator unlocks a domain name, and the domain transfer doesn’t go through in 10 business days, the domain is automatically relocked to the account. And, all transferred domain names have an audit trail that allows them to track down to the date and time of the domain transfer attempt, providing an additional level of domain name protection.

The first time reading this I thought “that’s maybe a usp (unique selling point)”.

Then I thought again… Hey, don’t we already do all of that at my site DomainsNow4U?

So I asked Nick Starai at our ICANN accredited registrar partners Innerwise who are responsible for domain name security, transfers and most of our other domain services and here’s what he told me…

Hi Fred, absolutely, we have been doing all of that for years! All domains in our system are locked at the registry level whether they are new registrations or not (as long as they have not been unlocked by the account holder).

Our policy is to re-lock the domains within 5 days of an unlocking, if a transfer request doesn’t come in. Also, the ‘secret question’ is required to access the TransferShield area, which provides an additional level of protection.

Even if someone were to compromise/hack/guess a user account’s username and password, they still cannot unlock/transfer the domains without the secret question.

It is ICANN regulation that all logs of transfer transactions are kept, so we have that as well. (IP address, time, date, email, etc..)

Read more about how DomainsNow4U keeps your domain names secure.