As any doctor will tell you 'prevention is better than cure', the following guide takes you through a number of steps you should take in order to protect your domain name.

1.Quite an obvious one but worth saying nonetheless; buy up as many existing domains as possible including for example .biz, .net and any domains in countries that you are planning to trade in.

2.Register any common misspellings of your domain, this prevents what are known as typosquatters.

3.Register the domain as a trade mark, but excluding the suffixes. This makes any dispute resolution procedures a lot easier- every business must own a trademark.

4.When new domains become available snap them up for example .eu. Build up your portfolio.

5.Point five is more of an admin issue. Basically you need to ensure that you keep up with the renewals of all of the domains, one tip would be to put all the domains with one domain registration company thus avoiding confusion.

6.Prior to registering your domains you should conduct a trade mark search in order to ascertain if there are any potentially conflicting marks already registered.

7.If you are involved in a domain name dispute we offer a fixed fee service for all domains .co.uk; .eu; .com

Send us your problem or complaint and we shall acknowledge receipt within 24 hours and advise you within 72 hours.