Do you own your domain name?

Do you own your own domain or website name?

If you found some link online to set up a website and ordered your domain name you had better make sure you own it.

The website hosting induustry is one of the top 10 scams on the FTC watchlist. That totally sucks for the good companies in the industry but the fact is 90% of all website hosts are not good at all. Most are resellers that only sell serverices on other companies servers which in iteslf is not all that bad. But smaller companies that don't own their own eqipment tend to be unreliable and sometimes unethical. Since they don't have full control or administartive access to a network they are not in control of anything. They also have less to lose if they go belly up since their investment is minimal.

Of course being a website hosting reseller does not make anyone a bad company, but accoding o the FTC it puts you in a bad crowd. Just when you though it was safe to buy something onlie you find out you may not even own what you bought.

So here is the deal. Some companies will offer to register a domain name for you to use. But the register it in their name and they own it. If their policy is that you own it and you have a contract, then you are safe. But in most cases they will hold it hostage if you leave, charge you to move it or not even give it to you at all.

This is done by unethical hosting services to insure you never leave them. If they own the name of your business you can only use it if you remain hosted with them. If you want to leave, they can charge you anything to buy it and that could be thousands of dollars.

In most cases it is just a few hunderd dollars and the businesses chaulk it up to a lesson learned.

As a hosting company we have learned first hand that these companies are beatting up their customers with transfer fees and domain changes.

People contact us all the time and want to move to our network. We ask if they own their domain name and they always say, YES, of course. But when they contact their host it is often not the case and getting that domain can be quite a chore.

If you had someone else register a domain name for you make sure you read the hosting terms of service to find out now if you own the domain and what the process is to get control of it.

BumbleBeeWorks offers a domain management service which cost about $5 a year to have our company manage the domain for you. This saves headaches and the trouble of keeping up with anual registrations. In our case, we keep all the domains in our name and transfer them back to the owner at any time for no charge. This allows us to manage thousands of domains effectively and make updates easily. I assume other companies would do the same, so don't pannic just because you had someone register your name.

But do check the status of it. It is verry common to have a webmaster register a domain name when they build your website. Unfortunately, it is the individual webmasters that are the biggest offenders. Since the number of clients is low they do everything to hold onto them and tend to take customers leaving as a personal attack.

In many cases, business woners will have to take webmasters to court to get their domain name released.

With the popularity of register.com, godaddy.com and others there is no reason a business cannot manage their own domain. If you are not, then make sure you do own it and if you need to move it or acquire other services you have the ability to do so.