Many hosting companies will offer a free domain name when you sign up for hosting with them. How convenient you might say! The reality is it is neither free, nor convenient…and it will likely cost you in the end.

In the past is was not unheard of for a few unscrupulous hosting companies and, it is sad to say more then a few nefarious (cool word) web developers, to buy domain names for clients under their own names. This is supposed to never happen anymore, but it still does sad but true. Especially with some of those nefarious developers. But that is something for another blog. This is all about the “Free” domain name most hosting companies offer on sign up.

Remember back in the old days when your grandma told you you never get anything for free…she was right! The truth is those free domain names are not really free, some one pays for them and in this case it is your hosting company. But don’t be fooled, in most cases they will pass on the cost to you in some other way. And don’t forget the small print, that domain name is usually only free the first year, in year 2 you will pay for the domain name. And as a rule, you will pay more then if you had bought the name through an indipendant register.

So why use an independent domain register? Each domain name has 4 “contacts” associated with it. The owner or Register, the Administrative, the Technical and the Billing. Each one plays a different part in the functioning of your domain name. The Register is all about who legally has the right to use the domain name, this is important, because you don’t want someone else to actually own your name. Many people however do not understand the importance of the second contact. This one is all about who actually controls the domain name.

So lets go through each Contact and what parts they play.

Register: This is the person that actually owns the rights to the name.

Administrative: The administrative contact usually has the highest level of control over a domain. Management functions delegated to the administrative contacts may include management of all business information, such as name of record, postal address, and contact information of the official registrant of the domain and the obligation to conform to the requirements of the domain registry in order to retain the right to use a domain name. Furthermore the administrative contact installs additional contact information for technical and billing functions. In short, they have complete control of the name.

Technical: The technical contact manages the name servers of a domain name. The functions of a technical contact include assuring conformance of the configurations of the domain name with the requirements of the domain registry, maintaining the domain zone records, and providing continuous functionality of the name servers (that leads to the accessibility of the domain name).

Billing: This is who gets the bill each year.

As you can see the person that has Administrative rights to your domain name actually has more control over your name then you do as the owner. So why is it imporant to have the administrative rights to your  name? Here is a quick case study of one of my clients.

Client has decided to re do his site. Several years earlier they had a site designed by another design company who has since gone out of business. Luckily the client was informed enough to get all the hosting information and retain it for the future. We have access then to their hosting server, great…let’s move on. Unfortunately, even though the hosting company has been very good over the years, they do not have the necessary support for the new sites functions. We are going to have to change hosts. Not a big deal, or is it?  It turns out the client registered their domain name with the hosting company and the hosting company is listed as the Administrative and Technical contacts.

When you transfer a domain name, the person that is contacted is the Administrator, not the Register. The administrator authorizes the transfer. So if you have a client that is planning on pulling their account from your company, are you going to be quick to authorize that move?

So what does the client do now? Well it is a bit of an uphill battle, and it will cause delays, but we will get it sorted out. But it should not have come to this. If the client had complete control of the domain name in the first place the change would have been seamless.

So how do you find out who has control of your domain name?

• If you bought your domain name through an independent company like godaddy in the first place, the likelihood is you have administrative rights already, just to be sure, go log into your registers domain management account and double check.
• If at anytime you had a designer or development company working on your site and had access to your domain account, go in and make sure they have not changed anything. But you are safe for the most part.
• If you did not actually register the name yourself and had someone else do it for you, log into the account and make sure you are set as the administrator. If you don’t have the username and password to log in…GET IT! You need to have that in your records for the future.
• If you registered your domain name through your hosting company at sign up…go to http://whois.com and look up your domain name. If you are not the administrator then you need to take steps to become the administrator right away. Some hosting companies will make it difficult, some not as much.

This is not about changing hosting companies, it is about taking control of your domain name. If the hosting company will not allow you to be set as the administrator, the take the steps to transfer your domain name to an independent register. You can still use the same hosting, but you will have the freedom to move at any time in the future should the need arise.

It is your name…you need to control it!

If you think you may not have control of you domain name and need help to figure out what to do, please fell free to fly me an email, I will help if I can, or point you in the right direction.