Knowing What Belongs To You

I had a VA contact me today, concerned because she’d been ‘off the air’ and unable to access her website and email. She’d had to use a free email account to send a message to me. The webhost had taken her payment but not kept record of it and had taken her off the web. She had proof she’d made payment – it showed up in her statements but they were being difficult to contact and not responding.

There is a very important thing for all to realise in a situation like this. What belongs to you and what you should have control of.

If you own a domain name you should have log in access to make changes to it, for example if you wish to shift webhosts, you should be able to log in and make the appropriate changes to point the domain to a new webspace. Having your ISP or webhost organise a domain for you is fine, but you should have log in access and control as the owner. I’ve lost count of the number of clients I’ve helped recover access to their domains – when I’ve been able to investigate the domains I’ve often found that either the webhost or the ISP was listed as the Tech, Admin & Registrant contacts – the client’s name wasn’t listed anywhere.

If you don’t have access to your domain name, change that situation today. Register with a registrar today and then apply to get your domains transferred from wherever they are currently.

Furthermore, if you have had a website designed for you, you should have access to log in and download the files, or have them sent to you. When you engage someone to design a website for you and you’ve paid them for it – the site belongs to you. They have no right to withhold it – providing you have paid for what was done. The webhost or designer does not hold ownership of what you engaged them to do.

So, if you have either ISP (internet access) or webhost (where your domain and website is housed) problems, you should be able to set up with a new ISP or a new webhost and have your domain and website transferred over within the 24 hour period in most cases. Often much less than that – perhaps 2-3 hours, depending on the situation.

Make sure you know what you own, what you have access to, and that you know where to go to get help if you need to shift things quickly. KMT

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