To register your own domain name in YOUR OWN account, please visit our domain and hosting website. OK, enough cheap plugs…. FOR NOW, onto the article….

Your domain name is your brand. It’s how your customers know who you are and where to find you. Just like you protect your important documents, its important to protect your domain name(s).

In my experience as a web developer, one of the most common hassles that business owners encounter is the ownership of your domain name, specifically, LOSING their domain name to a rejected or absent developer. As a designer, I usually take the “allow me to handle everything” approach with new clients, and register domain names for them. This isn’t uncommon, most developers will do this. The problem, however, is if your developer registers the domain in THEIR OWN NAME.

If your developer registers a new domain name, he/she can register your domain within their account. The problem with this is that since your developer owns the account, they also own your domain name. This is a problem for a number of reasons:

  1. What happens if you’re not happy with the service that they provide? If you decide to take your business to a new designer (me, for example), it’s up to you go get your old developer to transfer the domain or update the DNS records to your new site. If your old developer was unreliable in the first place, then doesn’t it stand to reason that they might be unreliable, or even passive aggressive, when you reject him and ask him to turn over your domain name? In my experience, developers always seem to make the excuse that they “didn’t receive the transfer request”, when they’re about to lose the business.
  2. If you’re like many small business owners, your Web developer is also a small business. A 1-3 person company operated out of a one room office, or even out of their home. What happens if your developer is abducted by aliens? If he’s the only person with access to your domain name, then it’s unlikely that you’ll ever get control of it again.
Simply put, allowing another person to have sole ownership of your domain name is setting you up for a hassle down the road when you invariably need to get control of it. Here’s what you need to do!
Option 1 – If you trust your developer, specifically ask them to set up a separate account and give you the username and password. (As a note, if you DON’T trust your developer, then we need to talk about your decision making process.) Make sure that your developer states in writing that YOU are the owner of the domain. It’s as simple as that. Once your site is complete, log into the account and change the password, update the Contact Information with your information, and keep it.
Option 2 – Register it yourself (preferably on our domain and hosting website). It takes about 5 minutes to set up an account and purchase the domain name. Once it’s set up, you can easily add hosting, delete hosting, or point your domain name to any website that you desire. I typical domain name costs $10-12, so it’s an incredibly minor expense to purchase your domain name, even if you’re not planning on using it for a while.
What to do if you can’t remember WHO owns your domain – Do a WHOIS lookup to find out who actually owns your domain and how to contact them.