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Information Technology News Master your domain with Linux | Master your domain with Linux |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 10 October 2007 | |
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If nothing ever changes, all is well. Yet, you might want to change web host for reasons of performance, or price or service or features or anything else. You might want to change domain registrar because another one offers a better price. You might want to hand over your domain name to someone else. Indeed, you might also want to cut your costs: you may well be needlessly paying monthly for someone to manage your domain name, even if nothing changes. This is an issue I’ve been dealing with a lot; for several years I’ve been working with companies that have pursued an aggressive growth strategy via mergers and acquisitions. Invariably, they end up with loads of domains. Almost immediately, the parent company is keen to consolidate web sites for the purpose of re-branding. And almost without exception, my question “what’s your registry key” is met with bemused looks. As I dig, I’m always disturbed by what I find. Here’s some real situations I’ve come across: * The original registrar provided the DNS service. Yet, the domain’s registry key is unknown. All registrars provide an automated facility to recover this, but invariably the e-mail address used to purchase the domain in the first place is an old ISP account which no longer exists. * Some companies are a bit more vigilant: one accidently let their domain name lapse and got such a shock that they hired a service provider to keep an eye on their domains expiry dates as well as host DNS for them. They paid $60/month for this, per domain. * Some of the above companies actually had business grade DSL Internet services. In these cases, their ISP actually provide free, highly reliable, DNS hosting with a backup mail service – which they simply didn’t use because they didn’t know about it, instead paying another company for a lesser-quality facility. * Another company had their own Windows Small Business Server (which comes with Microsoft Exchange) but used their ISP’s domain hosting service to manage their e-mail accounts. They got a few e-mail addresses provided and then paid an extra $1/month for each surplus address. Internally, they were all using POP to pull domain e-mail into their mail client. The ISP had a web site where e-mail addresses could be added and removed, but didn’t give any online means to add a new host (in particular, a “www” address, pointing to a web site). The company called their provider to request a www address record be created; the provider told them to e-mail. Yet, the specified e-mail address bounced back. So, they’re the problems. In one sense, domain names should be as easy as “set and forget” but every domain owner really owes it to themself to understand just what’s going on and get greater control over this purpose. Before we talk about tools, let’s explain the process and terminology. |
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