Sometimes I dismiss what is common sense to me not realizing there are plenty of people out there that, admittedly, do not have one tech savvy bone in their body – or so they think.
Today I received a call from a good friend who is bringing her Feng Shui business online. She was frantic. Her site was gone and she had no way of fixing it. She felt helpless and had no idea what to do and feared months of work was gone.
Once I got the full story on what had transpired over the last several weeks I was able to help her get it resolved. The short of the story is she had been requesting changes to her site for several weeks and the hosting/web designer had assured her the changes would be made. Sad thing is the changes were not made. Then she woke up this morning and her site had vanished.
With this sudden disappearance of the site and the circumstances surrounding the event I had my suspicions. I took a quick look at the url and sure enough her domain name was redirecting to her hosts home page. I figured no problem, it’s a new domain with no established incoming links I’ll just give her space on my servers and she can redirect the domain to my name servers. Problem solved.
Well, not so fast. You see she had her hosting company, a GoDaddy reseller, register the domain name for her, which they did. But – and a big but – the provider registered the domain name in their name not hers. And to make things clear the domain name is a branding name for her company.
In the end we setup an account up at GoDaddy and got her hosting company to transfer the domain into her name. I walked her through the account setup in less than 5 minutes. Now she has 10 tech savvy bones.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Never, I repeat, NEVER let someone else register your domain name for you. I’ve heard stories of less-than-reputable web hosts that registered the domain under their own name, making them the owner of the domain rather than you, then charging outrageous fees for the use of the name later . If someone else places themselves as the owner of your domain name there is little you can do, outside of a lawsuit, to get it back.
