Do You Own Your Domain Name?

A lot of times, a developer will register your domain name for you as a service and charge you the fee every year to renew it. That’s great if they are honorable people and there are no problems.

The real owner of any domain name is the “Administrative Contact” in the “whois” record. They are the person or business that has the legal ownership. You can go to court and prove ownership with this.

If your developer is listed as that admin contact, then they are the legal owner. Again, this is nice that they are helping you out, but be aware that you are vulnerable to having your domain name held hostage, or worse, stolen from you.

This is the “whois” that I use. It’s from an old registrar that I no longer use because they quit responding to all communication from me. They were horrible. But, I still use their whois look up because they are no flashing ads or captchas to slow me down. I’ll share their secret look up page with you.

Check who owns your domain name here.

If you are not listed for your domain name, take steps to change that or have it changed. Make sure that your email address is also listed. If someone hijacks your email account, they can have your password sent to them, log in and change the admin contact to themselves and steal your domain name.

Send me email if you want any help with checking on this.