Domain Registration: Register It Yourself

Some more words of wisdom regarding domain name registration and web hosting.

Register your domain yourself. Whether you hire a web designer to build your web site for you or not - register your domain yourself.

Here's the deal: To a domain registration company, the person who registers your domain is automatically the owner of the domain, whether you paid that person or not. So if you hire "the son of a friend" to do your web site and he registers your domain for you, he is the legal owner - not you. His name, address, phone, email, credit card and mother's maiden name will be used to identify the account owner - not yours. So when "the son of a friend" gets a real job and suddenly can never be reached anymore, you call the domain registration company and tell them "it's my domain - I paid the son of a friend to register it - now give me access." They will say to you "OK, we'll give you access if you can provide the following:
(a) the account login id and password and/or
(b) the last 4 digits of the credit card used to open the account and/or
(c) the mother's maiden name of the person who opened the account."
Of course, this information belongs to "the son of a friend," not you, so now you're stuck.

You get the picture. So if you can't get "the son of a friend" to respond, your only two options will be to start legal proceedings or to give up and register a different domain - both of these options stink. (This really does happen, folks - you wouldn't believe how many clients were stuck in this situation before they came to Blacks Design.)

So register your domain yourself. Carefully record
(a) the company name/web site used to do the registration,
(b) the login id you chose, and
(c) the password you chose.
When you have all this information, then you can go ahead and give your web designer access to the domain registration account, if necessary, so she can get your site up and running (or you can modify the DNS yourself - but that's another topic).