Thread: Web site hygiene, or protecting what's yours

I'd like to warn web site owners of a couple of things that you may not have thought about:


1. If you pay a web designer to create your web site for you, make a copy on your OWN computer of each and every page on the web site, including ALL text and ALL photos. Make occasional backup copies on a small external hard drive and store them at a site separate from your own home, such as a bank safety deposit box miles away from where you live. Update your backups periodically. I know a belly dance vendor whose beautiful web site suddenly vanished into the ether because her design/hosting company went out of business overnight. Their phone number quit working, their premises were empty, she had no way to reach them. She hadn't kept copies of the articles she had written for her site, nor her photos, nor any of the page design she had paid them to create for her. Everything was gone. Her business was devastated, because her primary sales channel was gone just like *that*.

2. Make sure YOU control the registration of the domain name. Ie, put it in your own name, with your own email address, your own postal address, your own credit card, and your own phone number. In the situation in #1 above, the vendor I described had allowed her fly-by-night design/hosting company to register her domain name for her. When they vanished, she was unable to obtain control over her own domain name - even though she had provided the money to register it, and it was the same as the name of her business.

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3. Check the expiration date of your domain name. Do it now. If expiration is less than a year away, renew it now. Make sure the registration company has current postal, email, and phone contact information for you. *Some* unscrupulous domain registrars have been known to auction off a domain name if it's not renewed by its renewal date. Once it has been auctioned off, you can't get it back. You wouldn't want a porn site to buy YOUR domain name, would you? Do you think I'm joking? Well, I'm not - in the course of cleaning up the broken links on my web site, I've been visiting each and every link that has an auto-referral, and some of the stuff I've been finding would be very upsetting to the dancers who used to own those domain names if they knew what their reputations were being linked to.

4. If you discontinue your web site, retain ownership of the domain name and renew it for a ridiculously long number of years. If you don't retain ownership of your domain name, it'll be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Advertising/spam sites buy domain names that are no longer being used and load them up with their advertisements, which could be for stuff you disapprove of. If someone else buys your domain name, there'll still be potentially hundreds of links pages on other people's web sites out there on the web with YOUR name linking to the domain name that used to be yours. I know of a web site that went belly-up 10 years ago which some current sites are still linking to. I'm not making this up. You don't want YOUR identity in the dance community over the next 10 years associated with a link that goes to a page advertising porn or other icky stuff, do you? As noted in #3, I'm discovering web sites on which this has happened.

5. If you decide to switch hosting companies, go to your domain registrar immediately and update the information to indicate your new "technical contact". If there's any bad blood between you and your former hosting company, they could do you dirty if they're still listed as your technical contact in your domain name registration company's database.

Does anyone else have tips you'd like to share?

These are excellent tips, Shira. My webpage designer and host went through some personal problems and kind of dropped out of sight. Luckily he talked to a colleague and had her contact me and she is now my web guru.

Thank you Shira, this is excellent! I will save these tips forthwith. I'm a bit concerned, because I don't actually know how to do half this stuff - I am extremely reliant on my webdesigner/host for these sort of technical details.

Thanks!

Thank you, Shira, this is invaluable information.


Khalida