Our fans who follow us know that together with POJISTENI.cz we regularly organize competitions and other events. Last year at a meeting it was suggested that we could also create a joint product. My colleagues from Insurance found out what the options were with insurance companies and the easiest to implement was Domain Insurance. However, if there is interest in the product, this is just the beginning. You have something to look forward to;)
What Domain Insurance is all about
We are one of the largest domain registrars in the Czech Republic, so we have been through a lot. And in truth, there is nothing worse for a customer than losing a domain. It is not only the web that is linked to the domain, but also a number of other services, including email, and these may be linked to third-party services. If all company communication, customer support, including billing, goes through them, a few days of downtime caused by a DNS change can be devastating for the company.
Losing a domain is not like a short-term outage or a total hardware failure, where everything can be restored within a few hours at most from backups. In these cases, you can always launch a temporary site with information and partially restore traffic. Delayed e-mails will arrive again or be returned. So either you receive them anyway, or the sender gets an error that the email failed to arrive and tries again, or contacts you in a different way. For these cases, most companies have a recovery plan with processes on what to do and how to do it.
But if you lose your domain, an attacker can launch a fraudulent e-shop or encourage people to install infected software within minutes. He will redirect the emails to himself and respond to them, for example, by phishing. Simply the nightmare of all e-shop operators.
Of course, there are procedures to block a domain and get it back, but it may not always be easy. Sometimes the police or a court must intervene with an interim measure.
In any case, the consequences (costs) are great. In such a case, prompt legal assistance and an insurance indemnity of up to CZK 3 million would certainly help. And that’s exactly what our new joint product is all about. Secure fast legal assistance to help you initiate the necessary legal action and, of course, money that you can use to repair your reputation or need for further litigation if someone gets hurt because of your domain.
This was the basic concept of the project. Slavia pojišt’ovna and Pojisteni.cz have improved it by adding other services that are part of other products related to cybersecurity or could be useful for domain holders.
For example, assistance and legal aid addresses:
- domain disputes
- domain transfer fraud prevention (domain transfer and sale)
- support and advice on domain lockout (by the registrar or registry)
- revocation of the domain by law
- trademarks (in particular trademark infrigement, misuse of domain names)
- cybersquatting, domain grabbing, typosquatting
- inheritance proceedings
For a complete list of what legal assistance and legal services can help with, please visit: www.pojisteni.cz/domeny
The above issues are dealt with by our customer support almost daily. Whoever is doing business on the Internet will encounter this sooner or later. We can advise and help with anything (for example, we have documents ready to sign and procedures in accordance with the rules of the registry and the laws of the Czech Republic). Of course, many things are not (domain disputes, trademarks, misuse of similar domains, etc.)
Domain Insurance is there to give you peace of mind, because if something goes wrong, you’ll have somewhere to call for advice on what to do next. And when things go badly wrong, you get something for it.
How to insure a domain
Our first suggestion of how the service could look and work was completely off 🙂
We focused mainly on the technical side of things, we wanted to condition the use of a number of security features, to have full control over everything, etc. Our colleagues from Pojištění.cz explained to us that insurance is not about that.
It has to be easy for everyone to use, we don’t have to check everything for the customer as we are used to with our services, because everyone is responsible for the security of their own property. It was also explained to us that insurance companies take into account the damage that can occur and are prepared to pay out claims. So it is not necessarily necessary to lock the domain in the registry and check its status every 5 minutes.
This was finally confirmed by Slavia Insurance Company during the meetings. Whether the conditions have been met is only checked when something happens. Everyone (including us) is always trying to take maximum precautions. The insurance will then help you to mitigate the impact if necessary.
Basically, it’s reduced our workload. The customer can dispose of the domain as he sees fit. From our side, we just call Pojištění.cz via API and ask them to set up an insurance (the call for payment comes from them). Then they will let us know via API to adjust the status in the customer administration. So they take care of everything. After all, they are licensed by the Czech National Bank.
Of course, we will assist you with the settlement of insurance claims.
By the way, it was not easy to push such a revolutionary product on the market, basically digital asset insurance for everyone, and we are glad that Slavia pojišt’ovna went for it. A great advantage is that it is a purely Czech insurance company. Even in the competition of multinational companies, it has achieved over a billion in turnover for several years in a row, for example, it is the general partner of Velká Pardubická. Like all other insurance companies, they are of course supervised by the CNB and have long met all market standards. It has almost the widest range of personal and business insurance products in the market and, given this flexibility, was able to tailor a product for domain holders.
A new small service that opens big doors
Domain insurance is a relatively simple and useful service. It is worthwhile for anyone who does business on the Internet. Over 907 thousand domains have passed through our system since 2010. Of course, we do not know about all cases, but we do know about perhaps a handful of cases where the owner would be entitled to compensation. But it’s mainly about the assistance and legal services. As we wrote above, customers deal with us almost daily.
Both POJISTENI.cz and Slavia pojišt’ovna have some expectations from the product. If we can meet them, we will show that there is interest in online service insurance and we can take it further. It is not so easy to steal a domain, but cyber threats, for example, affect the operation of companies on a daily basis.
Products aimed in this direction will not only provide you with a more peaceful sleep, but may also be conditional on the introduction and adherence to certain security standards that will generally increase the security of the Czech Internet.
Well, we’ll see how it goes 🙂