Who Owns Your Domain Name?
April 2nd, 2009 | by Conrad Walton |I ran into a situation again where a client has owned a domain name for years, but now they are not happy with their hosting company, so they want to move their site to my servers and let me host them.
This is usually a simple, quick, easy process, but it turns out that their current host registered the domain name to them, the hosting company, and not to her, the owner of the company. Now that she wants to transfer the registration to herself, they suddenly are not answering her email or phone calls. Since they are legally the owners, they could tell her to pound sand and hold on to her domain name.
It’s not moral, but it’s legal.
This is a good time to do a “whois” look up on your domain name and see who is listed as the administrative contact. They are legally the owners of the name. If you are not listed there, ask to be listed. Find out who the name is registered through. The best solution is to register the name yourself and list the hosting company as the technical contact. Let them make configuration changes to the DNS or whatever they have to do, but you need to own the name by having it registered in your name.
I don't want to offend all the Toyota owners. 
