Whilst the majority of internet entrepreneurs will nowadays register their own domain names without anyone's assistance, quite a few are still relying on web designers or developers for their domain name registration needs.
If you are one of those who have left every aspect of site creation, registration and hosting to an industry professional, the following case might interest you.
Earlier this week, IceGiant was approached by a new client with a problem.
Her web site, which had been running with reasonable success for a few years, was no longer available in spite of the fact that the domain name and hosting were paid up until the end of 2007.
After unsuccessfully trying to contact her web designer about the site's downtime for almost a week, she decided to call in outside assistance to resolve the issue.
As her web designer had been handling every aspect of site design and maintenance, all the client could actually give us to work with was the domain name.
Not really an ideal starting point in anyone's book...
After verifying that the web site in question was indeed unavailable, one of our techies went about checking the domain name's registration information, administrative contacts, IP address, server location and a number of other details.
The site was co-hosted through the web designer via one of the UK's largest ISP's web servers, a common enough practice, since most ISPs offer dedicated servers for web professionals.
Since the designer's own web sites, hosted on the same server, were also unavailable, as were all contact telephone numbers and email addresses, the inescapable conclusion was that he had given the whole thing up as a bad idea, neglected to pay the server bill and disappeared into the ether.
Although this is quite an uncommon occurrence, it is not entirely unheard of and our advice in these cases is normally to obtain a fresh hosting package for the domain, change its name server settings and restore the web site from the last backup.
"Backup? What Backup? My web designer was taking care of that."
After an initially bad start to proceedings, things were now beginning to look more than a little bleak.
But worse was to come, since the domain name was also registered in the web designer's name, rather than the client's. Needless to say that this left the client what is sometimes referred to as 'snookered'.
There is another term generally used by techies in situations like this, but it is not really fit for publication in an article of this kind.
Of course, this is a highly unusual case, in fact, the worst any of us had seen in a very long time.
It does however highlight the fact that these things can happen now and again, so if you are amongst those internet entrepreneurs who leave everything to their web designer, there are a few things you should do to protect yourself and your web site against all eventualities.
Check your domain name's registration information with one of the many services scattered across the web, such as Network Solutions Whois Search.
This will tell you not only what name the domain is registered to, but also the hosting provider, name server settings and a few other details.
If the domain is not registered in your or your company's name, contact the web designer or site administrator to find out why this is and to initiate the handover of the domain into your name.
Have your web designer provide you with regular backups of the web site.
These are vital in case things go wrong since, without them you have absolutely no way to restore your site if things go horribly wrong.
If your web site is co-hosted (this is not normally a problem) on the web designer's own server within another, larger ISP's system, be sure to include a clause covering service provision into your web design contract.
This at least gives you one avenue of legal recourse if the service disappears for any reason.
If the three points above have been covered sufficiently and things go wrong as in the example above, you will be able to restore your web site with a minimum of fuss and search engine disturbance by re-launching with a new web hosting account on the larger ISP's servers using your own backups.
Although the complete disappearance of a web site is a highly unusual occurrence, the practice of web designers registering a client's domain name to themselves rather than the client, seems to be a little more commonplace.
As an online business owner, you would be well advised to inform yourself of the relevant details, even if you are not technically minded, since it could ultimately mean the difference between you actually being able to continue your business or not, in case things end up going wrong.
The old adage; 'Better safe than sorry' definitely applies in this case.source: web design in Cyprus
No comments:
Post a Comment