Protecting Your Domain Name
Protecting your Company’s domain name is like protecting your company’s name. A company name embodies the business, what it is and what products or services it offers. The difference with a domain name and a company name is that a domain name is a virtual name or address that your clients type on their browsers to view your company’s website.
There are a growing number of SME’s and some big companies who have just recently joined in on the web band-wagon. Unfortunately, since most veteran businesspeople do not have a total grasp of the internet entrust their domain name and web hosting totally to their IT people.
In most cases, an IT person that is knowledgeable in his or her field does not necessary understand the importance and implications of their actions when it comes to registering a domain name for their employer. This being so, most of them register domain names under their names.
The danger of this to their current employers is that in the event of them resigning and moving on:
1) When the domain name is about to expire, their employer would not know where to renew.
2) In most cases, domain registrars or domain name resellers, will not even talk to these companies since
the name registered with them is the name of the employee and this is standard operating procedure in the industry.
3) Trouble really comes when the company decides to move their hosting elsewhere, there are some technical things like DN servers, etc. that need to be assigned to a domain name, these ensures that when a client visits the company’s website, they are pointed to the new and / or current website ip address.
What to do:
1) It is alright for a company to have their IT department of IT person register their domain name for the company, just make sure that these IT people register it under the company’s name and not their own name.
2) The company should keep a file of where the domain was registered, who the contact person is and when the domain name expires.
3) The company should also keep a file of how to access the domain name and how to access the website’s control panel. If the company uses a Content Management System (CMS) to run their site, they should also have a file on how to access these.
What if our IT has left and there is no way to get in touch with him.
1) go to this site.. http://www.internic.net/whois.html
2) enter your domain name (without the “http://www.”) and click submit.
3) when the screen refreshes, you would see who the registrar is.
4) check out the name server and take the address (ex. ns.domainnameregistrar.com) take the name after the first “.”, as that is most probably the company who registered your domain.
5) go to their site and you can see where you may get in touch with them. if you know that the domain is registered under your company’s name, you can still wing it and do some changes. if it is, however, registered under your former employees’ name, you either can stick to the current setup (because the registrar will never give you access) or you have no choice but to try to get in touch with your former employee or just register a new domain name.
