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Almost all new business owners know that in order to seem legitimate to their potential clients they will need to have a website. It’s just a given these days that customers EXPECT you to have a website. So don’t leave it out of your marketing scheme.

The more savvy new business owners will register a domain name for their business soon after they select their business name, safeguarding it from being scooped up by someone else. Those less technically inclined may rely on a website designer to register their domain for them, which has led to a million headaches for a million business owners.

First a short primer on domain names for the less technical, for those of you that already have a good understanding of domain names, skip this paragraph. Domain names are to the internet as your street address is to the real world. It’s how people find your business online. Normally your domain name matches your business name, but with thousands of domains being registered daily you may find that your exact business name has already been registered by someone else as a domain name. If that’s the case you will have to pick something similar. Domain names are not actually purchased, they are rented. Truth be told you never actually own a domain, you simply keep the registration or rental fee paid and you get to keep using it. If you fail to renew the domain on a yearly or other time frame according to your domain contract you will lose the domain and it will go back into the pool of available domains. Domains are registered through companies called DOMAIN REGISTRARS. Godaddy.com being the largest registrar. When you are ready to register a domain name you go to a registrar’s site, like GoDaddy.com, and search for an available name. Once a suitable name is found you register it through the site, signing up for a domain name account in the process. While GoDaddy will also try to sell you 500 other services, if someone else will be developing your website you don’t need anything but the domain.

Now that we are out of run-on paragraph hell, let’s get back to Domain Name Hell. The point of this article is to convince you as to why YOU should take the time to register your own domain, instead of allowing someone else to do it for you, say, for instance your website design guy. It might seem logical to just let them take care of it when they say “We can even register and maintain your domain for you” but take the advice of someone who’s seen domains stolen or held hostage, JUST SAY NO!

There is a simple reason why you should register your own domain. If you take the time to find and register the domain yourself when you do so it will be placed into a domain account in YOUR NAME. That means that YOU and no one else has control over it. And that’s a good, good thing. If you allow someone else to register it for you more times than not they will register it through their own domain name account, which means your domain will wind up in THEIR NAME and under THEIR CONTROL. That means if something happens to them or the company it’s a crap shoot as to whether you will ever get your domain name back.

I will give you a real world example to elaborate on this point. Recently I was contacted by a local business owner in the middle of a pickle. She had a website, a very poorly designed one, and the domain name was registered in the name of the person that designed the site. He registered her domain in his personal domain name account which means all of the contact information for the domain was his. As I said you never actually OWN a domain, but the person that registers it is who controls it, so it’s very similar to ownership.

She reached out to me because she had been contacted by her website design guy and he told her he was gravely ill and that he was getting out of the website design business. He also informed her that she needed to find a new host for her website. So she contacted me. The problem arose when I discovered that her domain was in HIS name. This meant that for me to be able to host her site one of two things had to occur. 1: Her old designer and host had to point her domain to my hosting or 2: He would need to transfer the domain into an account with her contact information attached giving her access and control of the domain name account.

For some reason her old website design guy was unable to grasp the concept of transferring the domain out of his account and into a new one in her name. Even after being sent step by step instructions he refused to transfer the domain. In similar instances I have seen old website designers actually ask for money to transfer the domain into their client’s name, sometimes as much as $5oo.oo in effect holding their client’s domain name for ransom. Fortunately in the case of my new client her old web design person finally was able to authorize the transfer into her name, and we were able to get her domain name under her control. From there we were able to access the domain account and set the domain name up properly to work in conjunction with my hosting.

It could have gone another way. If her old website guy had refused to transfer the domain there would have been NOTHING she could do to get it back. When it comes to domain name registrars, the folks that dole out the domains, they have to protect the interest of the actual person that registered the domain in the first place. From first hand experience I can tell you it doesn’t matter if the domain is the exact same as a business name that you can prove ownership of. The fact is is that if the domain is in someone else’s name it is theirs until you can get them to give it up.

So, how do you stay out of domain name hell? Educate yourself on domain names, how they work, and how they are registered. Then research and REGISTER YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME! That way you will always have control over it.

As a side note it may seem like a daunting task to deal with the technical aspects of registering and administering your own domain, which is the reason so many get registered under website designer’s accounts instead of their client’s accounts. The good news is that you can easily grant your website designer temporary access to the domain name account. They can use your login and password to go in and set the domain name up to work properly with their hosting. Then when they are done you simply change the password on the domain name account, protecting it once again.

If you are already in domain name hell and your domain is being held hostage by a website designer, x-wife, or just some knucklehead trying to make a quick buck I can tell you in all honesty unless your business is a fairly large one with a registered trademark on your business name there is very little chance you will be able to get your domain name back. In that situation your best bet is to register a new but similar domain name using your own domain name account, and starting over.

To search for and register a domain name visit GoDaddy.com