What's in a name (Choosing a Domain Name)
Here is the scenario. You have just started a new business up. You have picked a name, spent lots of money on office furniture, equipment and advertisements in the local papers.
Now you need to register your company. So you send down the junior office boy to register your company at the BC Access centre, and he registers your company in his name.
Sounds a bit far fetched? Well in the Internet world it happens all the time. Companies spend lots of money and time designing, maintaining and marketing their websites yet they don’t have control of their domain names. In fact many times their domain names are registered to someone else and at any time they could loose access to their website, email and all their Internet presence.
So how does this happen? Well, when a company hires someone to design a website for them the website designer is usually charged with registering the domain name for the company they are working for. What some website designers do is to register the domain name for their client in their name. So the website designer “owns” the domain name and has the ultimate control of what happens to the domain name. Now if you are on good working relations with your website designer that may not be a problem. However I’ve been in the business a long time and have seen website designers, come and go. Some companies are finding out the hard way that they don’t own their domain names. For example: All of a sudden a company’s website and email suddenly stop working. They call their website designer or hosting company, only to find out they have gone out of business. Generally this is bad but can be fixed. In this case it gets worse.
The business owner contacts me to see if I can help. Then I tell him the bad news. The domain that he thought he owned is actually registered to someone that he hasn’t talked to in three years. I find out that the domain record is registered to the person who designed up his website and that person is no where to be seen. After contacting the company that holds the domain name registrations we find we can do nothing as they will only talk to the domain owner or admin contact. The client ends up registering another domain name and starting all over having to get new email addresses for everyone in his office and a new website.
I have seen another example where clients didn’t keep their admin contact for their domain current. The email address on file as an old email address they hadn’t used for a number of years. The email was from an Internet supplier who was still in business providing dial up access. Someone figured out that if they called the ISP and got a dialup account with the same email address they would have access to his record. And that is exactly what they did. They got the email address, contacted the registrar, and got the registrar to send then the userid and password for the domain name. They then went in and redirected the website to another website and basically stole the domain out from under client2.
Now these are some nasty examples. Many of the problems are fixed with little or not disruption. Next time I’ll talk about the different parts of a domain name (whois) record and what yours should look like.
The Nisa Team
Domain name registration
