The web hero you need, you didn’t want
Okay, here’s the situation. A corporation moved their corporate headquarters down the road and it came time to update their web site. Okay, how do we do that. The computer guy that used to update the site has died, quit, or whatever reason but they don’t have access to their web site.
So we have MAJOR updates that need to be made to the web site. How do we go about doing this?
Normally you have a “web site guy” that you call but if that person is dead/quit/fired/arrested/deported/not returning calls or whatever the millions of reasons why you lose access to your web site.
Okay, no big deal, most web developers use a major web hosting company that can easily give you access if you can provide letterhead, Entergy bills or whatever type of verification you can provide, they’ll give you access. This is extremely time consuming and painful. Once you submit your info to the company they can take up to 7 to 14 days to give you access which means your email and web site maybe down for up to 2 weeks depending on how functional this domain registration or web hosting company processes tickets.
How do you avoid this nightmare situation? First step is to find out where your web site is hosted and where the domain is registered. You do this by doing a WHOIS lookup which shows you who your domain is registered . This is important because this is the first line of “getting access to your web site”.
I use WHOIS.net for most my general whois lookups.
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If this fails Godaddy has their own whois look that only works for their domains. I’m sure they configured it this way to make it only work with their web site for the most sincere reasons but i don’t believe them. Use this if the above fails.
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This tells you who is the domain registrar and who is listed as the administrative contact. This is extremely important because if you are not listed as the administrative contact you do not own your domain name. This is one of a kind intellectual property that you need to make sure you and your organizational own.
