You probably think you own your website, right? It includes your name, your advertising, and how to contact your business, right? Think again.

• Can you answer these questions about your Internet .com or .org domain?
• Do you really own your own website?
• Do you have control over its registration and renewal?
• Do you know what you are paying for?
• Are you sure?

Recently we have worked with several clients whom have been unpleasantly surprised by their website registration and management. In a couple of cases, website access and e-mail were interrupted while problems were resolved. In other cases, it required the threat of legal action for a company to get control of its own domain registration. One client had been paying a service each month for web hosting when another company was actually hosting their site. They were getting nothing for their money.

No matter how your business uses the Internet, you should have control of your web domain. Websites used to be electronic brochures. Now they are much more critical business tools. E-mail used to be a convenient way to communicate. Now it is an essential tool to communicate with customers and vendors. In the early days of the Internet, websites and domain registrations were mysterious and only understood by some specialized consultants. Now you can purchase simple software to create your own website. Many businesses now employ their own web designers. Even school kids know how to create a site.

Internet domain names must be registered, and your website and e-mail can be hosted either at your office or at an outside service. Website servers and e-mail servers can be in different locations. The information is public and easy to access.

When you first registered your domain name (yourcompany.com, .org., .edu., .biz, etc.) your web or IT consultant may have offered to handle this mysterious job for you, then listed themselves as the owner and contact. This means that they, not you, are in control of renewals and the hosting locations. They are also able to interrupt access to your website and all your e-mail in the event of a dispute. Some have been unwilling to provide the login and password they created to control a site when the client decided to work with another partner.

Whether you own your own site may be based on how a contract was written. Site ownership and copyrights may have been clearly spelled out. If your webpage design and hosting is contract-based, you should at least review the contract to see if it is current and still relevant. If not, you may be paying for something you are not getting. You may need the assistance of an attorney to get the login and password needed to manage your domain name.

The easiest way to check your website registration is to use an Internet-based tool. These are free and can instantly provide you with what you need to start with. We like Domain Dossier, which gives a lot of info without having to click through different links.

Go to http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx . Enter your domain name in the box, and select the domain whois record, the network whois record, and the dns records. Then click GO to continue.

In the Domain WHOIS section look carefully for the following:

Expiration Date
Registrant Name, address, and e-mail address
Administrative Contact Name, address, and e-mail address
Technical Contact Name, address, and e-mail address

If the Expiration Date is coming up soon you have to move fast, or your domain name may be suspended. Or, if you want to change or have changed your IT consultant, your previous consultant probably has not changed the domain registration. Renewal notifications may not be getting to you.

Within the past month, we were working with a company on behalf of a client, and we suddenly began receiving undeliverable messages in reply to e-mails we sent. We checked their domain name and found out that its registration had expired. When we talked with the company they said they had not updated the registrant contact info and that their renewal warnings were not reaching them. Their website and e-mail were down for 3 days while they resolved the problem.

If your Registrant Name and Administrative Contact info is for a former employee or consultant, you will need to contact them to get the login and password. If they are not available you need to contact the registration company to prove the site is yours and get control of it. It may take some time to go through the process, which is necessary because the registration organizations want to protect you from having someone hijack your domain name without your authorization.

The Network WHOIS record provides details about the IP address listed for your website location.

The DNS information contains two critical pieces of information about your domain. The A-record (in the Type column) is the location of your website. When someone types (www.(yourname).com, ,org, etc.) this is where they will be sent. The MX record is the location of your e-mail server. You can go back to the top of the page and enter mail.(your domain name) and see the locations of these servers. If your website is hosted by an outside service, but you have an internal mail server, the A and MX records will be different locations.

Finally, when we began working with a new client we asked to see their monthly bill from their Internet Service Provider. We saw that they had been paying them for years to host their website, even though the site was being hosted elsewhere. When was the last time you analyzed your bills?

It's time now to review your domain registration and what you are paying for.

Databranch is now hosting e-mail that is filtered by our DoubleCheck e-mail manager to block spam and viruses before they clog your network, potentially cause damage and impact productivity. We offer website hosting and work with partners you can trust. Call us with any questions about how we might help you.