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How can an unscrupulous hosting company steal your domain name? It's easy. When you ask a hosting company to register your domain name, they put themselves down as the "Registrant" of the domain. You might never know it unless you review the registration information, which most people don't do. Domain name registration requires various contacts.
In theory, all four of the contacts can be the same person. They usually are not. You will always find that the technical contact is a representative of the hosting company or of the company performing DNS for the hosting company.
The billing contact needs to be the person who will pay for the registration, and the administrative contact is the individual that InterNIC will communicate with when modifying the registration.
Make sure that the registration is put in your name if you don’t register the domain name yourself.
Don't Get Caught In This Trap!
Some hosting companies are so bad the only way they can try to hold on to their customers is to make it difficult to transfer your domain name. Say for example you are hosted by one of these types of companies and you just cannot tolerate their service any longer. You register your domain with our company and we promptly file for a domain name transfer only to find out that the original hosting company has listed themselves as the administrative and technical contact.
The domain registration company will automatically send confirmation e-mail to both of these contacts and expect a reply from at least one of them. But since the old hosting company is listed as the contact on both the administrative and technical contact, they just ignore the transfer or worse yet, reject it.
It's not the end of the world because there is a way to re-claim your domain but it adds additional work to an otherwise easy task. This entire situation can be avoided if you instruct your hosting company to make you the administrative contact for your own domain. At LightHouse Hosting, this is the default configuration.
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