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How can a company regain control over its domain name from a rogue webmaster?

December 23rd, 20066 Comments

This is a question that I’m hoping our readers can help us out with in the comments section.

My company is currently working with two clients who entrusted their domain to their respective webmasters. The webmasters have violated that trust and completely abandoned their customers. The companies have come to us looking for options. But, honestly, we don’t know what our options are.

We’d like to take the quickest, most cost-effective approach that brings force from the beginning. We’ve already played nice. Now’s the time to get tough.

Any suggestions?

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How can a company regain control over its domain name from a rogue webmaster?

Dan | December 23, 2006

Do you mean he has access to their domain control center and ftp, or was he the one to actually go through the process of paying for and registering the domain?

Check for written evidence of all communication, along with a date of the webmaster and/or the hosting company. Your domain is usually separate from your hosting provider, so you may be able to login to your domain account and point it to a new server.

Ryan | December 23, 2006

Unfortunately, in both cases, the original webmaster has full control over the domain (employed as contractors, under instruction from the company, the webmaster purchased the domain name).

FTP access isn’t a very big deal because the person in control of the domain has ultimate control and could change servers in a heartbeat.

Yeah, I alway advise clients to separate hosting from domain ownership, but unfortuantely, many non-technical companies just want a one-stop solution, and have a local one man shop (often a jerk), do everything for them from scratch. That’s a recipe for disaster, and that’s what we’re facing right now with two of our clients.

jim | December 24, 2006

Is the one-man shop being unreasonable in what they’re asking for? How large are they? Perhaps just threatening to sue will scare them into submission? If not, actually take them to court and the judge will probably rule in your favor if it’s obvious the one-man shop is trying to take advantage of your client. If your client just isn’t willing to pay a fair price for the domain, I’m not sure what recourse you have.

Ryan | December 24, 2006

The “one man shop” has basically failed to respond to communication. In other words, we’d be willing to pay for the domain name and transfer and whatever, but the guy has completely cut and run.

Dan | December 25, 2006

I would suggest to move to another domain, maybe a .net or .us version of the same domain. Keep all written communication between you and the perpetrator, and once your site gets up an running, try and fight the battle then, maybe with more success. If you can establish yourself as the trademark holder of the domain name, you should be able to fight anything pretty easily.

Tim Linden | January 1, 2007

Contact the registrar. Many have a tedious process you can go through to get a domain back. Faxing various documents and such to prove its yours.

Share your thoughts!!!

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How can a company regain control over its domain name from a rogue webmaster? was written by Ryan on December 23rd, 2006 at 1:17 pm and posted in Websites

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