Protecting Your Domain Name

Protecting Your Domain Name

Your Domain Name is a Valuable Asset!

Some hints on how to protect or recover your domain name.

I am very pleased that we’ve been notified today of a successful domain name recovery for one of our new website design clients on the Isle of Wight.

The Beauty Room from East Cowes, Isle of Wight, came to us a couple of weeks ago with a problem that we see all too often in the web design Industry. They had engaged the services of a friend / website designer to build their first website for them. The friend had registered the domain name for the client, but instead of registering it in the clients name they registered it in their own name.

After a period of time the good relationship between the client and friend broke down and as a result the client’s website was no longer being maintained and when the friend stopped paying hosting fees the clients website was taken off line completely ruining the clients online presence.

Despite numerous emails from the client to the former friend the situation did not get resolved.

The Beauty Room initially asked us to build a new website under a new domain, but after hearing of the problem with their existing domain name we decided to instigate the dispute procedure through nominet.

The whole process was completed very quickly and today we learned that out client had regained control of their original domain name.

The good news with all of this is that the whole dispute resolution process was very quick, it is all done on line via the Nominet website and there was no cost involved other than a £10 fee for changing the registrar details on the domain once it had been handed back to our client.

I am now looking forward to creating The Beauty Room’s new website which will be online within a week at www.thebeautyroomiow.co.uk

Protect Yourself

As I said we see this all to often and not just from the friends of people that have built them a website but sadly we see this from large and small website design companies too and at least a dozen times this year I have had to go through the same process to regain control of various clients domain names.

You can protect yourself from this kind of problem by following a few simple guidelines.

If your website design company registers your domain names for you check that the domain name is registered to you with your email address as the contact email address.

If you are using a .co.uk domain name and you follow the advice above you can control your domain names from Nominet’s website at www.nominet.org.uk if the relationship between you are your website designer ever ends.

Most importantly of all think about registering your domain name yourself, it’s a very straight forward procedure and can cost as little as 99 pence with some registrars. If you do this your website design company will be able to set up DNS settings to point the domain name to hosting space while you retain control over the domain name account.

You can check the ownership of any domain name using a whois service such as http://whois.domaintools.com , if you are not shown as the owner of the domain name you need to be asking why!

Your domain is as valuable an asset as your home or your car, don’t let anyone take control of something that is rightfully yours.

For full details on our website design, SEO and ecommerce services please visit our main website at www.theisleofwightcomputergeek.co.uk