John Jantsch offers some simple--but valuable advice in a recent post.  Basically he says, "Make sure that you have ultimate control over your domain name or risk losing it or suffering some serious downtime if your web host goes belly up."

This recently became important for a local nonprofit that had left everything related to their website in the hands of the designers.  Their site was just three months old when the web developer went out of business--and didn't answer calls. Their site went down and a few difficult days followed as they tried to sort out all of the relationships.   And this was not some small grassroots organization where technical confusion might be understandable--it was a nonprofit with a very large IT department. 

To prevent this from happening to you, check out TechSoup's thorough (and free) Technology Inventory Worksheet that can be used to document important technology information and assets.  It starts with external services (like domain name, web hosting, email hosting) and goes even further to prompt you to think about your:

PC Inventory
Server Inventory
Back-up Configuration
Software Inventory
Physical Security Risk Assessment
Staff Skills
Network Inventory
Printers and Peripherals Inventory
Technology Management Questionnaire

Walking your staff through this worksheet can be a great eye-opener to risks your organization may be taking by not having all of this documented and regularly updated.