In the Internet world your domain name is the equivalent of your house, and the land the house sits on. Just as with real estate the domain name has a legal owner. In real estate the deed or title tells who legally owns a piece of physical property. On the Internet, domain names have the same type of information.
Anytime a domain name is registered for use it is assigned a registrant and an administrative contact. Whoever appears in the registrant field is legally the owner of that domain name. The administrative contact, while not the official owner, is the master email address of record. Any changes to the domain name must be approved by whoever has access to the email address.
No matter whom you work with to design and host your website either you or your company should always be listed as the registrant.
It is extremely important to check this yourself. You can use any WHOIS service to lookup this information for free. One we recommend is:
http://www.domaintools.com
Simply type your domain name such as blainehilton.com in the lookup field and click search. Scroll down to the registrant information section. If this is not in your name then you may have an issue. Many unethical hosting companies and web design outfits will register the domain to themselves. This way you must stay their client, because they, not you own the domain name.
Would you have the deed to your house put in the name of your plumbing company?
Tags: domain, domain name, domaintools, hosting, property, unethical
[...] James "Rick" Dragoo, Jr. wrote an interesting post today onDo you really own your <b>domain name</b>? « Blaine on BusinessHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
Great info here, nice site I will be checking out the other articles you have and linking back to your site.
You make an interesting point as to the fact that a company should retain the domain in their name. But you also made a statement that it is unethical for a hosting company or design firm to retain the clients domain in the designers account. Many times a client is under contract and when the domain is in the clients name they are able to steal the domain, and the unpaid website with no recoarse. Clients that are under optimization or maintenance agreements should not be able to move their website without paying their contract. Just like a builder puts a lien on a home or property for their protection. There are more unethical clients out there, than there are unethical designers.
You make a good point as well. If you (the designer) has control of the domain do to contract then it is not unethical. When writing this I was thinking of a few clients that we have that switched hosting to us and they were not under contract by their previous host. But the previous host held their domain name hostage so to say, and would not release it to them as a way to force them to keep their site with them. That is what I meant by unethical.
I never would have thought of that