Manage and Protect Your Online Identity with Safenames: A Time-Tested Provider of Domain, Trademark Protection, and Hosting Solutions

TL; DR: Safenames, founded in 1999, leverages more than 20 years of experience to help legal, operations, and marketing departments effectively manage and protect their online portfolios. The company’s comprehensive suite of web-based products and services runs the gamut from domain management and online trademark protection to dependable web hosting and disaster recovery solutions. By serving as an extension of your team, Safenames aims to help save time and money, ultimately boosting ROI.

We learn at an early age that a proactive approach is often safer and more effective than a reactive one.

Brushing your teeth is easier than filling a cavity. Installing a fire alarm is more efficient than extinguishing a house fire. Wearing a seat belt is smarter than dealing with the aftermath of being ejected from a vehicle.

When it comes to protecting your brand online, the story shouldn’t be any different. Being proactive about detecting potential threats is far more effective than cleaning up the financial and reputational damage caused by online attackers.

That’s why Safenames features brand and online trademark protection services within its comprehensive suite of web-based products and services.

“We were quite early adopters in the brand protection space and have acquired a deep understanding of how online portfolios need to be managed,” said Andy Larwill, Hosting Client Services Manager at Safenames. “We’ve always been a challenger in that sense, and our legal team is very well respected in the industry.”

But Safenames offers much more than brand protection. The company has also earned a trusted reputation for its domain name registration, expert customer support, hosting, disaster recovery solutions, and security services, among other offerings.

Headquartered in Milton Keynes, England, with regional offices around the globe, Safenames also specializes in registering country code top-level domain names (ccTLDs) in more than 240 countries and territories around the world.

Ultimately, as a one-stop shop for managing and protecting clients’ online portfolios, the company’s goal is to help users save time and money, boosting ROI.

Safenames was founded in 1999 as a provider of website services and co.UK domains before evolving into a full-fledged registrar.

“We got ICANN accreditation in 2002 and then set out to gather as many accreditations worldwide as we possibly could as a direct registrar — as opposed to using agents, like many other registrars at that time were doing,” Andy said. “At one point, we were the only registrar outside of China that was able to register Chinese domains; the same for Australia and so forth.”

Safenames soon became one of the world’s largest accredited registrars; so large that many mainstream registrars turned to the company when registering domains on behalf of their clients. Over the last few years, Andy told us the company has been increasing its managed services and hosting products with the goal of becoming an end-to-end provider of everything IT.

“Be it building a content delivery network (CDN), Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) procedures for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), you name it — we’ve been around the block a few times and have become a one-stop shop for all your online needs,” he said.

In terms of portfolio management, Safenames offers a range of solutions. The company’s International Domain Portal (IDP), for example, makes it easy for users to register and manage thousands of domain names.

“There are so many TLDs now that some of our clients have 10,000-plus domain portfolios,” Andy said. “The majority of that is just proactive brand protection, making sure that they’ve got it, and no one else can have it. This approach has always worked well for us and our clients.”

Safenames also offers shared, virtual, and dedicated hosting solutions, plus a hosted anti-spam service, via a Tier-3 data center located 68 miles from central London. The highly secure site, built to FSA standards, features caged private areas, a business continuity suite, and 24/7 access via permanent passes.

The datacenter is also used as a part of the Safename Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering, designed to reinstate an organization’s critical operations as soon as possible after a natural or human-made disaster. The company is currently offering bespoke solutions to its clients in this area, which may expand in the near future.

“We are very proud of our data center and are eager to move our hosting services along,” Andy said.

Andy said Safenames strives to provide legal services tailored to meet client needs, and 2018 was a reflection of its success. In that year alone, Safenames recovered 132 domain names through enforcement notices and arbitration. Of the 61 arbitration proceedings filed, the company achieved a 100% success rate.

Top client sectors included retail, tech, security, financial, and customer goods, with a global reach of more than 30 different ccTLDs. The countries with the most complaints came from the U.K., U.S., Canada, Ireland, and Italy. The top five respondents included China, the U.S., India, Germany, and Nigeria.

In addition to assisting with dispute resolution, Safenames offers several brand protection products, such as Mark Protect. This proactive service simplifies the process of policing for trademark infringements to protect a brand’s financial investments and intellectual property, defend against harmful pornography or gambling content, and recapture diverted traffic.

Other services include Domain Watch and Domain Retrieval. The Domain Watch service allows users to customize regular email alerts on newly registered gTLD or ccTLD domain names that contain particular keywords or brand names that may infringe on a trademark.

Domain Retrieval helps fight cybersquatters who register, use, or traffic domain names to profit from a trademark that belongs to someone else. These online criminals cost organizations millions of dollars in lost traffic, customer confusion, and reputational damage.

“In the past, you could just have a dot com and be OK,” Andy said. “In the last decade or so, cybersquatters have become a huge problem for more corporate companies, and that’s where our legal team comes in.”

Safenames also delivers a broad selection of domain security features that keep users safe from cybercriminals while preventing internal mistakes made inadvertently, such as accidental DNS changes.

Every client at Safenames is matched with a dedicated account manager who is available to provide assistance as needed. Andy said the knowledge of the company’s account managers is one of the most significant factors in its success.

“We become an addition to your team, helping you, advising you,” Andy said. “For smaller companies that don’t have a full IT team, this is a huge value proposition. But you’d be surprised to find that even some of our bigger clients don’t fully grasp the landscape of domain names, hosting, and everything else. They rely heavily on us for day-to-day tasks.”

Andy said Safenames never pushes products that the company doesn’t believe in or use itself, but it does play a role in bringing new products to clients.

“There are smaller companies that have amazing products that don’t have the reach they should have with some of the larger organizations,” he said. “We help bring some of those real game-changers to the market quite quickly, helping them become household names in the industry.”