I hope this doesn’t turn out too much of a rant, but I want to take on an issue that has been bothering me as the last few days I have been once again dealing with release of a clients domain name and feeling like my hands are tied behind my back because someone else has control.
Lets start with a little understanding of how your domain name works. Your domain name in simple terms is the address of your website, also known as URL. If it wasn’t for domain names we would have to remember the actual address of websites which would look something like 65.13.6.55. The internet would be a lot less friendly if we had to remember all these addresses. Well, in order for this to work, a service has to point your domain name to the actual address of your website. This is often but not always handled by the same company that handles your web hosting. Different companies offer different prices for this service, but the going rate should not exceed $10 each year. If you are paying more you should consider switching. So why don’t you go ahead and do that now. I’ll Wait….
Having trouble? Do you know how? Did you even know that it was a separate service to your website hosting? This is often what we discover is the case with new clients. Would you buy a car that had a padlock on the hood so that only the person that sold you the car could look under the hood if something went wrong? Well this is the case of many who trusted somebody else to set up everything for them.
The steps in releasing a domain name include contacting your current registrar, usually by logging into their administrative panel if you know your username and password, unlocking the domain name and then obtaining a authorization code that is then sent to the email address on file as the administrative contact on the account. So here lie a couple problems, are you the one that set it up? Do you know that email address?
Before it leads to problems, make sure that you have complete control of not only your domain name but also your hosting. What happens if your current provider becomes difficult to reach, or in the case of one of our clients last year impossible to reach? Even if you don’t think you will be the one to make changes as it can be a confusing and intimidating process, make sure that you have the necessary access so that you can have somebody else do it for you. Do it now before it becomes a problem when things are expiring, or you want to move your site.
We encourage our clients to use an affordable web hosting and domain management service, we have been using Dreamhost as they have good rates, good service and they offer to host all of our 501c3 organizations for free. They also have an easy to use control panel so we make sure that our clients are the primary contact on the account and then add us so that we have the necessary permissions to make changes to the account and get everything set up. However if somebody wants to switch their designers, they can easily log in and give somebody else permission to access their account including everything necessary to move the site.
Keep your information up to date, the most important being the administrative email contact on the domain name. If you change this address it can sometimes lock the account for a period of time making a delay in releasing the domain so don’t wait until it is expiring to make a change.
Your website belongs to you, don’t trust the “we’ll take care of everything for you” approach, unless you know that you will always know and be able to quickly get hold this person. Get hands on with your site and understand the basics of how things work so that when something goes wrong you don’t feel frustrated and especially don’t let your website go down, or lose your address, because you don’t have this understanding or access.
If you are ready to contact your current provider, ask them how you change your domain name information. They should provide you with a login and let you go in and take a look. If you are having difficulty with this, please contact us or leave a message and we’ll see if we can help you regain control of your site and it’s domain name.
