Don’t get locked out of your website!

Often times the company that designs and develops your website will register your domain and setup your hosting package for you. While this can be of great service to you, make sure they are listing you as a contact on the accounts and providing you with all usernames and passwords.

What happens if your consultant moves and you are no longer in contact? Or if you are working with a web company that goes out of business?

If you are not listed as a contact on the accounts, you will not be able to access them without going through a long process to prove your identity and ownership of the site should you need it.

Here are 4 things you need to know about your website to make sure you have full control over it

1. Your username and password for your domain registrar. As long as you are listed as a contact on the account you should be able to request this information at any time. To see who is listed on your domain, you can do a “who is” lookup on any domain registrar’s site. Network Solutions and GoDaddy are 2 of the popular domain name registrars. You need this information if you are ever going to change hosts. You will have to login and change the DNS with your registrar in order to move your site to another host.
2. Where is your website hosted? Ideally, you will have FTP information (host, username, and password) to the web server your website is on. This information can also be requested at any time as long as you are a contact on the account that is setup with the hosting company. The “who is” lookup may tell you who your host is if you are unsure. You need this information to make any changes to your site or to copy the files to a new host.
3. If your website uses a database, you will need to know the username and password. You want to make sure you can get into the database to make any changes in the future or if you need to move your site to a different host for any reason.
4. The administrator username/password to manage your email addresses. Most hosts now offer a web based email administration as part of your hosting package. This will allow you to add/modify/delete email accounts as necessary. This is important to have if you are changing hosts so you can make sure you setup all email accounts with the new host. If you don’t setup the new accounts, you may stop receiving email!

Dawn Chiu (DQ)