1. Always backup your data. You can backup your domain name management data by simply backing up a folder. Please see this blog post for more details.

2. Don’t fillup the projects with data you don’t need. Software like Domain Punch Pro and Watch My Domains ISP allow you to obtain and store a large amount of related data for each domain. Lookup only the data you need. You can selectively lookup the required data by using the “Lookup Some” or “SQL lookup” options in these products.

3. Use the domain Finder tool for finding domain names. Domain Manager is for managing your domain names. Use the “Finder” tab (available in Watch My Domains ISP and Domain Punch Pro) for finding available domain names. It is built for that.

4. After you have retrieved all the data for domain names, enable auto-update and set it to re-lookup the data at leisurely intervals.  Don’t enable auto-lookup at the beginning, especially if you have a lot of domains.

5. Manually check your domain records, probably, once a month. You can quickly sort using the Expiry date or Admin contact and find domains that need to be renewed or emails that don’t seem to be correct.  You should also manually inspect the raw whois data (lower panel) for your important domains.

6. Always make sure that your contact emails work and that you can receive emails from your registrar. Any email you use as domain name contact should be well protected using a strong password that is never used for anything else. For example, never use the same password for registering at an online forum.