Web Design, Development & Integrated Marketing

Website design, Internet technology developments and integrated web site marketing are crucial to your web site success. We've written a series of articles with our customers in mind to help them choose a website developer and the right technology within a reasonable Internet marketing budget.

Domain Name Ownership

For around $10 you can “own” a little piece of the Internet for a year. Registering your Hawaiian website domain name, also called a URL (uniform resource locator), is relatively easy. Usually your webmaster takes care of the details for you. Even so, you should know a few things about domain name registration.

When registering your Hawaiian website domain name, there are four contacts and a login username/password to access your account. Most important, the registrant is the person who registers and owns the domain name. Another important contact is the administrative contact who manages selling or reassigning a domain. This person is also responsible for updating contact information such as company address and phone number. The next contact is the technical contact. This person updates the name servers (they direct Internet users to the server where your website is hosted) and takes care of any technical problems. The last contact is the billing contact, which handles renewal fees.

Your business should be listed as the registrant and someone in your organization should be listed as the administrative contact. Sometimes, webmasters do not put their client as the registrant, instead they use their company name and contact information. This can lead to problems. Without proper authorization, proof of identity and ownership (established with photocopy of legal ID and email sent from email account on file), changes to domain cannot be made. If you are not the Registrant and your webmaster disappears, making changes can be time consuming or worse, impossible. Best case scenario, it may take weeks to provide the proper documentation to change contact information. Worst case scenario, your webmaster sold your domain to someone else or/and will not relinquish it.

To avoid the whole potential problem, get a copy of the registration information, including the username and password. If you don’t know who owns your domain, find out free of charge at Whois.net or ask your web design developer for details.