Protecting your Most Important Web Asset – your domain name

Recently one of my customers was held hostage by their service provider who controlled their domain name registration. This whole experience was very messy, it cost the real owner potential business and could have been avoided by a few simple rules:

• Register your domain name(s) under your own name and pay for them separately
  • The registrar will recognize you as the rightful owner of that name without question
  • You will be able to change hosting providers by a simple change of DNS address – you now have control
  • Your hosting provider can remove your hosting privileges, but cannot prevent you from having another hosting company host your website and this redirection can take effect almost immediately
• Do not let your third party hosting provider register your domain names under their name
  • It may legally be your name but as far as the registrar is concerned the other company has the right to use it as they are paying for the name and they will do nothing without a legal document to allow you to take control
  • If any billing or other dispute takes place you are at the mercy of that provider who can tie up your website domain name until the dispute is settled rather than settle it through other legal means. As long as the dispute is not settle you can be without your website – not a good situation to be in these days.
• Use a large reputable firm for your hosting and domain name registration.
  • These companies will register your domain name within your hosting package which is under your name and you pay for it so there can be no dispute as to whom the owner is
    • Of course if you have a billing dispute with them there may be issues, but these companies have means for recourse and generally will not take your website down without a lot of warning
    • There is a process generally to settle disputes so it can take the emotion out of the equation.
  • You can easily switch companies and packages and they do give lots of support.
• If you do decide to use a smaller organization ensure that you have control of your domain name but you can allow them to access that account to make the right changes
  • All you have to do is to change your password and the hosting provider no longer has access
  • If your password was changed then you reset your password using the “forgot password” feature or go directly to the Registrar to obtain access
• Register your domain name for longer periods, if you forget to pay then you can easily lose the registration and someone else could grab your domain name.
  • If you are the registered owner you will be notified but if someone else owns the name and they forget to tell you then you can loose the domain name and it can be very hard to get back if at all.

I cannot emphasize the importance of being registered as owner of your domain name. Yes you can get it back but look at the potential cost in time and money to do so. Can you really afford that?

So if you are in the situation where your domain name is registered by a third party then get them to change the registration to your name. If you are not sure who owns it go to www.whois.net and enter your domain name to find out who is the Registrar and other information. If the registration information is private then you may need to go to the registrars website to get more information. Some digging may be required but you will be able to find out who is the holder of that registration. You can then contact the registrar and at least get a contact email so you can resolve the ownership.

Generally you won’t have a  problem, but as was the case of my client not knowing the implications of domain name ownership caused a lot of headaches and money to resolve. Their solution finally was to register a variation of their business name and develop that new brand – a difficult task to rebuild one’s business.