Domain Name Shuffle
So, if I offered to detail and tune up your car, but I told you I needed the title before I could begin working on it, you would call me an idiot.
But this is exactly the same thing I see all the time with small businesses and their domain names, if a website developer says you need to transfer the domain name to them, they are lying, don’t do it. There is no reason to ever do that. When you are the registrant and the domain name is in your account, it is legally in your name, you own it. (in regards to licensing from the registrar)
So when you transfer that name to another person, like a web developer, you are handing that registration to them. It is not an uncommon practice, but it is not a good one. There is no real reason that a 3rd party should have your resources in their name.
2 or 3 times a year I have to deal with the fallout of this, usually with new customers, sometimes with old ones. 9 times out of 10, they lose the domain. I will admit, when a developer takes the registration it is usually not malicious, but more than once I have seen a domain name be held for ransom from the company that paid for it. But most of the time what happens is a well meaning developer takes the name, does the work, then just falls off the map: students get jobs and move on to better paying work, companies close down, employees leave, people have accidents, email or phone numbers change.
When this happens the people involved have to petition the registrar for domain recovery, which requires gathering a ridiculous amount of paperwork and documentation to prove you are the rightful owner of the domain name. I have seen this work exactly one time. If that fails, and it probably will, your next option is to sue for the name, which can be incredibly slow and most of the time the court will throw it out before you even get to talk to someone because they usually refer back to the registrar to verify validity of the claim. I have never seen this work.
This leaves the end result of needing to select a new domain name and starting over. Building a new site, new email addresses, redirecting services, and there is a good chance you wont be able to redirect or close off the old services because you can’t get to the DNS.
The reason I see a lot of web developers do this is to help maintain the site/service by managing the DNS records for the customer. It means they don’t need to rely on a non-IT customer to keep their records up to date and looks good as a value added benefit. But there are ways to do the same thing without taking their account. You can setup a 3rd Party DNS, like Cloudflare, which has a very good free package, or setting up sub accounts, or just relying on your registrars support. I may not like Godaddy very much, but they do have a quick and useful support team.
It’s a long, painful process to try to recover from a lost or stolen domain name. Be smart, keep your assets in your name.

















