An interesting story came out Wednesday in the "Gardian Unlimited ", a British newspaper regarding domain names. It seems that a company known as "Myfilms" started a big promotion for a service they were offering and used the domain name "myfilms.com" to promote the new service. The only problem, they did not own the domain name. It was owned by someone in Washington, DC. and of course, can't be used until they get the domain registration.

 Over the years I have seen similar types of problems crop up. The most common is when a domain name isn't renewed before it expires and someone else buys the domain name for another use. It can be very expensive to get your domain name back if this happens. In one case, a government agency who will remain nameless lost their domain name (it wasn't a dot GOV address) and a porn site actually purchased the domain and started pointing it to their server. You can imagine how shocking that can be for customers. The agency ended up having to pay thousands to get the domain name back.

As often the case, the person that was listed as the registar for the domain name, along with his email address had left the agency and the contact information was nevered updated. Nobody was checking this information regularly and the email addresshad already been deleted from the server, so there were isuues just getting the domain name transfered. The entire time folks were opening the website in their browser to find a porn site at what they expected to be a government agency location.

This same think has happened to churches, business, and personal domain names and can occur for a lot of reasons. At least once a year anyone that owns a domain name should check to make sure their information is current, and the domain name is paid up. This can ensure that you don't have to reprint business cards, letterhead, etc because that information is steering your visitors away to someone else.

Be first to comment this article

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.

Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4