Security. Protection. Backup. We're all familiar with protecting our assets –data, personnel records and credit card numbers. But after spending thousands of dollars on brand and identity campaigns, how many small business owners get scammed out of their domain names?

It's one thing to register a domain in good faith and then have the ICANN approved registrar turn into an international mockery like Register Fly. It's another scandal for domain registrars to send misleading postal and email to scam domain owners into giving up control of their domains and losing their Web sites [see one here and the FTC press release [pdf].

It's not good enough anymore to shift the responsibility onto those who "get it." If you own a business, then you just have to learn who owns your domain, know how to control it, and be aware if someone is trying to steal it. Your domain name is in the top three of your brand/identity package. Can you afford to give it away because you don't understand how it works?

An individual, group or business registers (not "buys") a domain name from an approved registrar. There is an up-front fee and an annual renewal. (This is not the same thing as paying for Web hosting, although you can pay the same registrar for both.)

HOW TO LOSE YOUR DOMAIN
Business owners lose domains when:

1. they forget who registered the domain name
2. the person who registered it changes an email address (and can't access the old one)
3. the person who helped you register it put it into their name and not yours because "you didn't understand it" and they did
4. the registering party 'goes away' for any reason, like the college intern who helped you graduates
   
5. and the worst: the Web design firm you hired registered the domain in THEIR name in THEIR account and won't release it, or doesn't exist anymore.

All of the above are part of our everyday experience; we "yank" domain names and return them to their rightful owners all the time. It's a skill, a science and a smidgen of social engineering.

HOW DO YOU GET YOUR DOMAIN CONTROL BACK?
Learn more about domain names – yours especially – and keep tabs on it. Your business should be the registrant, one of the most important roles on a domain name. The second role is administrative contact who has almost as much power as the registrant. I've had to tell too many angry business owners that they have no legal right to their domains, most often because they "didn't get it" and handed off these critical contact roles.

Third is the billing contact whose job is as simple as it sounds: pay the annual domain registration bill and don't be internationally embarrassed as was the Washington Post when it forgot to pay its annual bill. Finally, there is the technical contact, very often defaulting to the registrar unless you change it to the Web hosting company you use (they'll usually demand it and for good reason).

Some registrars are offering the one-role solution, where one person is the admin, billing, and technical contact all rolled into one.

Know who your contacts are and make sure they are up-to-date. Check your "whois" status at any of these links.
http://networksolutions.com/whois/
http://www.internic.net/whois.html
http://whois.domaintools.com/

WHAT IF YOUR CONTACTS ARE WRONG?
If your contacts are incorrect, a mystery, or shows the name a disgruntled ex-employee, browse post haste to your registrar's Web site and click Support (your registrar is listed in the whois information). Once there, file a support ticket or call. Explain the problem (painful as it might be). Every registrar has a system for reclaiming control of a domain name but some make it next-to-impossible for civilians to accomplish. Prepare to be on hold. They will possibly require:

• a faxed photocopy of a picture ID that can be seen after faxing
  
• letterhead from your company with your request
• their complex forms filed electronically or by fax
• your first-born child

GET HELP
My firm, like many reputable others, offers simple domain management as part of your web hosting fee. However, we charge for complex domain management (aka "yanking your domain") because it takes patience, time and expertise to jump through all the registrars' hoops. In their defense, registrars must ensure that the appropriate parties are given control of domains and unfortunately too many domain names are living in litigation because someone – and that's usually the business owner – didn't bother to check the whois regularly and didn't understand what it all meant.