Own Your Domain Name Or Else!

Do you know who has the rights and therefore ownership of your domain name? 

An even better question if you’re a home owner … would you sign over the deeds to your home and still expect to live there? 

This is a serious issue and if you’ve allowed your webmaster to take control of registering your domain name, you NEED to read this blog post VERY carefully …

I have come across three situations in the past few months where my clients have either allowed their webmaster to register their domain name on their behalf or, in one case, my client was persuaded to sign over his domain name to his webmaster!

I can’t think of any other way of saying this so I’m just going to stick to Trish style …

Allowing your webmaster or anyone else to register your domain name is like signing
 over the deeds to your house and still expect to have all the same rights to live there!!

In the event that you were allowed to live in your home after you sold the deeds you’d be a tenant right?  Yes … and, you only have tenants rights … right?  Which means the landlord can sell at any time … right?  And when the landlord sells you have to take all of your belongings and find another address to live … right?

Well imagine your webmaster has registered your domain name and puts themselves down as the administrator … who do you think the Registrar is going to contact when it’s time for the domain name to be renewed?  Yes, it’s the administrator and NOT the registrant!

So despite the domain name being registered in your name (making you the registrant) it’s the admin contact who is the person or entity if it’s a corporation, who is entrusted with the power to make significant changes to a domain name such as transferring ownership of that domain name to a different party,  or moving the domain to a new Registrar without your knowledge. And if your domain name Registrar does not have additional security measures implemented, such as notifying the registrant in the event of these changes being initiated, you could wake up one morning and find that you’ve been evicted while you slept.

In other words, the address still exists but you just no longer have access to it.  

Fortunately, two of my clients have achieved successful outcomes, but so far, one of them is still trying to find out what happened to their domain name which seemed to have been renewed without their knowledge (in fact, they didn’t even know the domain name was due for renewal because they were not down as the administrator) and now, the domain name has disappeared from their Registrar account.   The hosting account is still active and they can see all of their files on the server, but without that domain name - the address - having an active hosting account is meaningless. 

So, what do you need to do?

1. Go and check the ownership of your domain name … Go to www.WHOIS.net and check the registration details.  What you want is for the admin details to be the same as the registrant name - i.e. YOURS!!  

    

2. Make any necessary changes to the admin if the registrar allows you to or, contact your webmaster or the person who registered your domain and arrange for them to update the admin details
     
3. If necessary, move the domain from it’s current registrar and ensure that when you complete the registration information, you put yourself down as the admin contact for your domain name
    
4. If all else fails, seek legal advice

If you’re facing this situation right now, I wish you every success for a favourable outcome …

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