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Net Watch Article - Domain Names

Domain Names, those little things people scramble to get to help make them unique from all the other Web Sites. There was a day when things were pretty simple. There was one authority and they kept a big database of all the names and who they belonged to. Network Solutions was the only “Registrar.” The only problem with this arrangement is that being the only registrar they monopolized the pricing. Today the picture is very different. There are several top level Registrars and many of them have reseller arrangements that allow for anyone to manage domain names for their clients. The good news is that the prices have come from $35 per year to as low as $14.95 per year. The bad news is that some of these registrars favor the reseller over the registrant.

Ok so what do I mean by that last statement. Here is how a typical transaction used to take place. If you wanted a domain name you would go to Network Solutions pay the $35 fee and “register” your name. There were three contacts for every domain: Administrator, the “owner” of the domain; Technical contact, the person responsible for making technical changes to the domain like host name changes, etc; and the Billing contact, this is where to send the yearly bill. In most cases you would be the Administrative contact and billing contact and your web host would be the technical contact. You being the administrative contact, have total control over the domain. This scenario favors you the registrant. Many registrars still follow this rule, however there are some that don’t.

Recently I was helping a client move about 20+ domains from his old web provider to a new registrar. This should not be a difficult thing to accomplish. Well it has been two months trying and we are still not done. The reason, he was registered with BulkRegister.com through one of their resellers and they favor the reseller over the registrant. Even though he was the Administrative contact, the reseller had to approve all requests! In a practical sense his domains were being held hostage by the reseller. I finally had to make calls to BulkRegister.com and have them place an automatic approval flag on his records in order to bypass the reseller’s involvement. We will find out this week if this solves the problem.

Truthfully, these problems have more to do with the character of the person that is handling your Web Site than the place your domain is registered. If the reseller had simply approved the notices, things would have gone smoothly the first time. It really gets dangerous when you “trust” the person to register your domain and you are not listed as the administrative contact. There are times when out of convenience and timing that we register a domain for a client using our own contact info, but once the site is up and paid for, we modify the admin contact to that of the site owner. It really is a matter of trust and track record.

We currently use our web host as the registrar for all our domains and are in the process of creating an easy interface for our clients to access and change their registration information and to administer their domains. If you are curious as to what is going on with your domain, point your browser here http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois and type in your domain name without the www. The results should display who manages or who is listed as the contacts for the domain.