domain admin (was Unscrupulous Webmasters)

Ben Ocean <lists(at)TheWebsons.com> wrote:

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am continually amazed and disgusted with so-called webmasters that take
clients' money to register domains on *the clients'* behalf, who in turn
register those domains in their *own* names so that they can control the
clients' Web site. This, of course, is illegal and unethical. But it's a
pain in the a@# to work out. Does anyone have an easy solution to this problem?
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I generally register myself as the admin contact for domains I'm either 
transferring to my own hosting or registering for the first time. Since I'm 
a hosting reseller, the hosting company is the technical contact. Only one 
client of mine has declined having me be the admin contact. And when 
transferring domains it's always been the case that the previous developer 
was the admin contact.

Therefore I've always felt that I was doing this the right way. This is a 
part of my service; i.e. most of my clients wouldn't know how to deal with 
NetSol forms etc... as highly usable as they are :)

So far I've only had a problem with transferring over once, where it looked 
like the previous webmaster didn't want to approve the change. As it turned 
out, my client was unlucky enough to talk to someone in their office who 
just didn't know what they were doing but pretended that they did.

So I suggested she speak to the boss of the first person. The domain change 
got approved one hour later. One of Murphy's Laws, Hanlon's Razor comes to 
mind "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by 
stupidity".

Another recent experience of mine argues for the rightness of making myself 
admin contact for clients, at least IMHO. Recently I got a change request 
from another hosting company, but no corresponding communication from the 
client. I contacted him to try and verify that was what he wanted.

He said that was his wish. It turned out this other company sold him on 
redoing his website, and also sold him on the .net domain corresponding to 
his .com; for which btw they've registered themselves as tech, admin, and 
billing contacts. Which I never do, I'll always list the client as the 
billing at least.

Anyway, I looked at the .net domain and saw a "Coming Soon" page. So I 
pointed out to the client that while I'd be happy to approve the change if 
that's his wish, within a few days of my approving it his site will 
transfer, and if they don't have a site up and running people clicking to 
his domain will get nothing. And why they didn't at least copy his current 
site to the .net site which he's paying for hosting is beyond me... my 
hosting clients always have full ftp and telnet access to their sites so 
they could have easily done this.

Even though he's generally unwilling to listen to anything even remotely 
technical from me, he did understand this. He said I should hold off until 
he gets back to me. That was about two weeks ago and I haven't heard back 
from him yet.

Just my two cents.

Marty Landman
http://face2interface.com/

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