Many individuals and businesses have a web site but few understand their rights to the ownership of that site, or their responsibility to maintain that ownership. I bring this up because of a call I received last week from an individual whose website was “stolen”. They went o­n the Internet the other day to look at their website and something completely different appeared. Someone else was using their name and promoting a completely different product than the original owners had. In this example, no crime was committed. I will explain.

When you create a website, there are three costs involved. The first is the purchase of your domain name or URL as it is sometimes referred. This is the unique address you type into the browser to find your site such as www.yourname.com or www.buymystuff.net. These can be purchased from hundreds of sites o­n the Internet and are not that expensive. You can purchase these for a minimum of o­ne year and for multiple years if desired. o­nce purchased, your domain need to be “pointed to” the physical computer that your website will reside o­n.

The second cost involved is the purchase of the hosting package. This is the money you pay to rent a space o­n o­ne of the thousands of web servers located all over the world. There are free hosting packages available but they have their disadvantages and I won’t go into that here. Most people host their site o­n an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that is in their geographical area although there is no reason not to host o­n a server half way around the world, if it is a good, inexpensive, and reliable hosting server.

The third cost is to have your website created and maintained by a website designer of your choosing. Many people like to do this part themselves and there are many programs and books out there to help you create your own website. Many times the customer will have a website designer take care of all three steps for them and just pay o­ne fee. The web designer sends your website from his computer where he/she created it up to the server and can take care of all the details regarding #1 and #2 above.

Here is where you need to be a good consumer and know a little more about the process.

You are the owner of your domain name and the owner of your website. Although most people grant their website designer or website administrator the power to control all of this, and although most people do not understand the technicalities of domains and hosting packages, you should still have all the details readily available.

If you have a business website and delegated any of the work involved in setting it up to another person, you should still maintain complete control over its future.

Whether you or someone else purchases the domain name for your website (the www.yourname.com), make certain that you have the contact details from the company it was purchased from, and the corresponding username and password to access control over the domain’s use. Most importantly, make sure you are listed as the registered owner of the website, not the person or company that is creating your website for you. All registered domains have four contact individuals listed o­n the Internet. Your web administrator can be listed as the technical contact or the administrative contact but you need to be listed as the registered owner. This way, if any changes are made to the status of the domain, you are informed as well, and you should be notified when the domain name is about to expire.

This is how my friends’ website was “stolen”. He was not listed as the owner, and the design company that was listed as the owner went out of business. When the domain name expired (remember, you purchase these for a limited time and then have to renew), the owner did not know it and that particular domain name became available for anyone else to purchase – legally. Thus, my friends website was not really stolen. He was the victim of ignorance.

Now before you go reaching for your identification to check who you are, let me reassure you… I’m talking about your domain name.

Forgetting to renew a domain name can result in HUGE headaches, including paying additional fees or even having a competitor or domain name reseller grab your prized domain name.

Depending o­n their goals, they may use your old domain name for their site, they may agree to sell it back to you at an exorbitant price, or they may even completely refuse to sell the name back to you, essentially holding it hostage.

Sure, there may be legal action you can take if you have trademarks in place, but that takes time- and during all this time, your site and your e-mail are down!

So, how do we avoid all of this in the first place? Roll up your sleeves and let’s get started, shall we?

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#1. First, let’s check!
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Crank up your favorite web browser and visit the web site of the registrar for your domain name, or just choose o­ne from the list below. These are just a few of the registrars I could think of, not an inclusive list, and are simply in alphabetical order.

Dotster:

https://secure.registerapi.com/services/whois.php

GoDaddy:

https://registrar.godaddy.com/whois.asp

Network Solutions: http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index.jhtml

Register.com

http://www.register.com/whois_lookup.cgi

Once there, follow the prompts to perform a whois search for your domain name.

Verify the expiration date for your domain name, and put a reminder o­n your calendar (RIGHT NOW) to renew it at least 30 days prior to the date given for the current expiration.

If you are already within that 30 day window, renew your domain name while you are thinking of it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

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#2. The expiration process
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All is not lost if your domain name has expired. There is a period of time after its expiration that you can still reclaim your prized possession.

Here’s how it works.

On the date that a domain expires, the registrar removes it from the root servers (the list of domains currently registered globally); therefore, any web sites or e-mail associated with the domain name will begin to stop working.

At this point, the domain has entered a 30 day period called the “Redemption Period”. The redemption period is a grace period that allows you to re-register your domain name in the event that you simply overlooked the expiration date, didn’t receive the expiration notice, etc.

You may contact your registrar during this period to renew your domain, but will nearly always have to pay an additional fee in order to retrieve your domain name from redemption.

The amount of the redemption fee could be an additional $50 – $90 (US), but each registrar sets their own fees for this service, some higher, some lower. Whatever the amount, it is in addition to your renewal fees.

After the 30 day redemption period, the domain enters a phase called “Pending Deletion”, which is approximately 5 days in length. During this phase, the domain is essentially “frozen”. It can not be retrieved by the original registrant and it can not be registered by another party.

At the end of this phase (which in practice may not be a full 5 days) the domain is o­nce again available to the first applicant that requests to register it.

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#3. Don’t count o­n it
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If your domain name expires, don’t assume that you can simply re-register the name again o­nce it becomes available, thereby saving the redemption fees.

Even if it is a little known name, there are literally thousands of companies and individuals that may grab your expired domain the second it’s available, preventing you from re-registering it.

Companies that offer to send targeted visitor traffic to your web site often do so by purchasing other expired domain names.

Companies that resell domain names may snag your expired domain in hopes of selling it back to you at a premium or selling it to another party.

Someone else may have just really wanted the domain name you had and placed a back-order for it (a request to purchase if the name becomes available).

Most organizations and individuals that purchase expired domains do so using automated software, and therefore have a much higher likelihood of obtaining the name than an individual attempting to monitor availability by hand.

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#4. Summary
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Each registrar has their own policies regarding expired domains; therefore, the time you have to rescue your domain from the hands of others may differ from the schedule above. Check your domain name now, and keep a reminder to renew it. That way, you can avoid the potential issues and additional costs of an expired domain all together.

The story of the domain name dispute between etoy.com and eToys.com uncovers an important issue facing all webmasters, should we register domain names that are similar to ours? In the eToys debacle, a group of artists registered the domain name “etoy.com” in 1995. Then in 1997, an o­nline toy store bought the domain name “eToys.com” and in 1999, chose to sue etoy.com for the use of a similar name.

At first, etoy.com was forced to shut down it’s site but thanks to public pressure eToys.com dropped it’s lawsuit in January. (For more o­n this, please read http://www.rtmark.com/etoyline.html) Of course, not all domain name disputes will lead to court but there are reasons why webmasters should consider registering similar domain names.Firstly, we spend a lot of time and effort marketing our websites. It would all go to waste if someone registered a similar sounding website and all your traffic went to them instead. Worse, if this site’s focus was completely irrelevant to yours, then users would be totally confused and will probably not return again. For example, if you had a site called AboutBigApple.com dedicated to the city of New York and there’s another site called AboutBigApples.com all about apples. A visitor expecting to find pictures o­n Central Park or the Empire State Building would be served up photos of Grannys and Galas instead. Rather disorienting don’t you think?

Another good reason for registering similar domain names is to use them as doorway pages to help improve your search engine position. So you could have each domain name pointing to a single doorway page which is optimised using META tags and descriptive titles. The doorway page then links to your original site either automatically or via a link or button which users click o­n. With this, you would have protected all permutations of your domain names AND helped improved your search engine rankings.

So how do we decide which similar domain names to register?

It’s entirely up to you but the following guidelines can help. Say you have a domain called xxxxxx.com, possible high-risk domain names would be :

xxxxxxs.com
xxxxxx.net
xxxxxx.org
xxxxxxs.ne
txxxxxxs.org

Or you can try this service at http://www.nameprotect.com mmonitoring.htm that helps trackyour domain name for possible threats. The service generates a free monthly report o­n yourdomain name and gives suggestions of high-risk domain names to register. It also has a feature that can tell you if anyone is trademarking a name that’s similar to your domain name.

What happens if there’s already somebody else with a similar name?

The best thing to do is to co-exist with this other site. Most of the time, whenever someone registers a similar domain name, it’s done completely innocently. For example, our site at www.payingads.com started receiving emails from visitors saying that they couldn’t get intotheir accounts using their username and passwords. A quick check in our databases revealedthat these visitors were not our site’s members but members of a site calledwww.payingad.com. This site pays people for viewing ads while our site is a global exchangefor people looking for paying web ads to place o­n their websites. Our businesses are differentso it was obvious that payingad was not trying to usurp our users. So we’re content to justleave things as they are.

However, we still get user complaints o­n our site mistaking us for the other site, typicallyaround 2 to 4 a day. If you find yourself in this situation, deal with it carefully. Though some ofthe emails can get quite irate, remember to always be courteous and take time to clarify thesituation to them. It’s bad enough that they keep getting “Invalid password/username”messages whenever they try to log o­n even when they’re certain it’s the right password orusername. It’s like being told you have brown eyes when you know your eyes are blue. Politelyexplain that there is a site of a similar name and direct them there. Also, explain more aboutyour own site as they might also be interested in your own services. Who knows, you mighteven come away with a few more new visitors to your site.