Web site control and ownership

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I have a domain name and a working website on free hosting at the moment. I intend to upgrade to a better form of hosting. However, the problem I have is a breakdown in communication with the person who put my site for me. He seems to be able to tweak and change things as and when I want him to, although can leave me waiting. And for this reason I want to take control of my business and site, so to speak. However, he hasn’t been very forthcoming and I don’t know what to do. I have feeling he doesn’t want to hand over web site control! I really want the web site control and ownership – can this be done? And would I be able to do changes and tweaks etc. once I have upgraded hosting and maybe purchase a web package?
A. H.

A professional web site consists of a domain name, the web hosting account and the actual web site files (web pages and other multimedia files). The ownership and the control of these can lie with different individuals. Once you consider these three segments as individual entities, understanding web site control and ownership becomes easy to explain and to grasp.

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In their haste to have it up and running as quickly as possible, many people simply do not care about web site ownership and control issues. This can lead to problems when relationships turn sour. All of this can be avoided if the various aspects of a web site are understood at the onset.

Domain name ownership and control

The most important ‘element’ of your online presence is the domain name. You can change web hosting any time you like or ‘lose’ all web documents but as long as you have the ownership and control of the domain name, the site can be put back online once again.

Each domain name is associated with three three ‘Contacts‘ – Administrative, Billing and Technical. So how can you come to know that the domain name belongs to you?

Do a WHOIS search on [affiliate link →] Network Solutions, probably the best company that sells domain names, to ascertain if all the information in these contacts are yours. The Administrative Contact is the most important and should reflect your name, postal and email addresses and phone numbers. Please remember that domain names are registered for one or multiple years. The WHOIS result will also show the expiration date – remember to renew before this date else you may lose the domain name.

Domain names are bought from domain registrars like [affiliate link →] Network Solutions. Typically, you need to go to the company web site, search for a suitable name that’s available and then register it. During this registration process, you would be asked to create an account on the web site which is used to manage the domain name. Thus, the first thing is to make sure you have the username and password of the account at the domain registrar web site; and don’t share this information with anyone. Sometimes the company from whom you are getting the web site developed may ask you for these details, in which case I suggest you change the password once their work is over.

If only you can access the account at the domain registrar web site, everything is fine – you have the full control and ownership of the domain name as well as the web site.

Web hosting ownership

Just like domain names, web hosting can be purchased for one or multiple years and has to be renewed once the expiration date approaches. Web hosting involves taking on rent a little hard disk space of a computer connected to the internet 24/7 (a server machine). As I mentioned above, when the domain name is under your control, there is no need to worry about web hosting because you can change the server any time. By the way, if you own a small or medium sized web site, you may consider the excellent (and probably, cheaper) hosting plans reliable web hosting companies.

Ownership of web site files – documents and images

Who owns the content – text and images – of your web site? Legally, the ownership lies with you when you’ve supplied the all content. But there are many gray areas, for instance, when the graphics are from a stock archive.

Remember to ask the web developer for a copy of all web site files on a USB drive.

What if your site has been pulled down and you don’t have a copy of the web site? Visit the Wayback Machine – you may just find everything there. Read how to view a deleted web page. I’m not a legal counsellor so if things really turn nasty, you can contact a lawyer (what else?). An easier option is to get the site and all its content developed once again. This will probably be a lot cheaper that what you dole out to the attorney.

In conclusion: As long as you have the domain name account login details, you have the ownership and control of your web site.

And oh, changing web pages on your own requires a little bit of skill. You can either use a WYSIWYG HTML editor or learn the web page language – HTML!

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