Bad Web Day

A Cautionary Tale

It had been a good week so far. Non of the staff were off sick and a couple of clients had actually settled their accounts. Which was just as well, since you just written a rather large check for the huge amount of stationary that you had been talked into buying by the printers the previous month. The delivery man had to make 3 trips, carting seemingly endless bundles of stationary, envelopes and business cards into the office.

“Oh well,” you thought, “at least I shan't have to worry about buying any more stationary for the next few years! The colours do look quite nice, I'll just compare them against the web site ........”

You call up your web site on your computer and stare at the screen in disbelief while that little man in the pit of your stomach starts to tie that familiar knot. “There must be some mistake,” you think, “maybe I mistyped the address.” You try again, and get the same content that is clearly not yours and is offering your domain name for sale. The little man tightens the knot.

You launch your email client and try and download your mailbox and get a 'User Unknown' failure message. “This can't be happening, there must be some mistake,” you think, “my man always informs me of problems or when he expects me to pay some renewal.” You wonder if you missed something whilst you were away on that skiing holiday or if someone has 'hacked' the site and you hadn't noticed.

“Did anyone see any emails from our domain name registrar or web hosting company or the chap that does our web site over the past month ?” you ask the office staff.

“I think I saw several mails with something about the domain name,” replies your assistant, deep in thought “but I deleted them as I thought they were just spam. Oh, by the way, the email hasn't worked since this morning.” The little man adds a couple of turns to that knot.

You phone the chap that you met in the bar that registered the domain for you and designed the site, only to be informed that the number is no longer in service. You hurriedly ruffle through your desk drawer and, relieved, find the paper with the telephone numbers you had scrawled down for the domain name registrar and the web host.

Several frantic phone calls later, and you know that you are in serious trouble. The nice 'chap' that sorted out everything for you a couple of years ago has not been seen for the past 3 months and no-one knows where he is.

The registrar told you they sent repeated mails to your 'man' asking for the name to be renewed, but that all went unanswered and, since no payment was received, and since you apparently never owned the name in the first place as he had registered it in his own name, the domain name expired and was purchased by someone else and, “No”, there was no way you could get it back.

The web hosting company said they had sent you several mails as well, but since you didn't answer them or send any money,, they cancelled the account and deleted all the web files, and “No”, they don't keep any copies and shouldn't you have your own backups anyway?

Attempts to re-book the name meet with dismal failure. A company specialising in speculating on domain names snapped it up, and is now trying to sell it back to you for thousands of euros which you can't afford.

Biting the bullet and contacting a reputable IT company to seek advice only confirms your deepest fears. You can book a similar name but have little or no chance of recovering the original name, along with the now non-existent email addresses, you know, the ones that are freshly printed on the next three years supply of stationary you just took delivery of! And what about the web site files? Unless you can get copies (you know you can't) or have backups (you know somehow you never could find time to spare the 5 minutes that might have taken) you will have to pay someone to recreate the site for you at vast expense.

Your week just went from 'good' to 'disaster' !

An all too depressing and familiar scenario! Ask any established specialist IT company (not the 'chap' you met in the bar one night) and they will regale you with hundreds of similar stories.

So what can be learned from all this ?  Obviously one issue is that the renewal demands for your web hosting and domain names are so infrequent that they can easily be overlooked, with the sort of consequences we have just read about.

Another frequent assumption is that you own your domain name and web hosting. This is often not the case and there are several considerations to be taken into account here. In the case of your domain name, you never own it in perpetuity, but rather, lease it on a yearly or two-yearly contract from a registrar.

Once you have let the name expire, anyone else is free to register that name and use it themselves for whatever they want. There does exist a long and tortuous process for processing disputes with ICANN, the central organisation responsible for all domain names but this is not a quick nor an easy fix and may not yield the results you are looking for. Of course, if the domain name was never registered in your company name in the first place, you never had any legal title to it, and any attempts to gain control over it are doomed to failure.

Whilst we are considering the ownership of the domain name, if it is not registered to your company, you may find it difficult or indeed  impossible to comply with any legislation imposed by the Spanish and European “LSSI 34/2002 de 11 Julio” directive regarding the registering of your interest in a web site with the appropriate authorities.

As far as your web hosting is concerned, there is little more you can do other than to ensure you have up-to-date backups in your possession. Things do happen, web hosting companies can go bust, your web designer could have disappeared or the web  server could suffer a hard drive failure and you will loose all your precious web site files unless you have adequate backups in place.

Make disaster recovery plans. Know who to contact, and what steps you can take, to get your website and email services up and running again as quickly as possible.

Remember the old adage “You only get what you pay for”.  A reputable IT company that has a proper office and has been in business a number of years is a far more acceptable risk than some 'chap' that works off the back of a mobile phone.

Don't fall into the trap of trying to cut corners and costs by not using a proper IT company to set up and manage your web hosting and domain name services. A good IT company will start pestering you weeks before any critical part of your web or email presence needs to be paid for and renewed and won't just rely on a couple of emails but will phone you if necessary. They will have services available to take regular backups and store them safely on your behalf and will constantly be monitoring your email and web site servers for anomalies or problems. There may even be available plans to manage your domain names in their portfolio with provisions to renew the name on your behalf even if they are unable to contact you for any reason.

Do shop around for the right company that will look after you. It may not be the cheapest that you can find, but you do need it to be in your local time zone (you don't want to have to be waiting up all night for a support desk to open) and should be contactable by phone in an emergency and, preferably, have a local office you can pop into and reassure yourself that they are a serious operation or at least, demand that they take you for a chat and a coffee !!

Happy hosting.

Technology Services RPVW S.L.

5^th May 2009