Who owns your domain? Is it you? It better be. If you are not listed as the registrant in your domain registry, it may spell trouble for you down the road.

A lot of you reading this may have shared hosting accounts. For you, chances are that your host picked up the tab on your domain registry if you are on yearly contracts. Go to one of the many online whois checkers, or if you are using unix or Mac OS X, pull up a shell and type in “whois thenameofyourdomain.”. Doing so will return four entries in most cases:

• Registrant- This should be you, unless you are paying extra for private registry.

• Registrar- This will be the registrar that your domain is registered through.

• Administrative contact- This will be the person or party responsible for the administration of the website at this domain.

• Technical contact- This will be the person or party responsible for administering the server the website associated with the domain resides on.

There is also a billing contact in your registry. This should be you or the person or party responsible for the financial administration of the domain. This is not visible to people conducting a whois query.

If you pay for private registration, the information shown in a whois query directs to the proxy that is providing the private registration for you. In most cases this will be the registrar.

If you do not have private registration, your name, mailing address, phone number and email address are going to be publicly viewable. Does that sound scary to you? It kind of does, doesn’t it? I don’t know how many people out there are doing whois queries with malicious intent, but it is a possibility. I don’t worry about it too much myself.

You’re thinking to yourself, well I’ll just doctor up my registry info with some bogus entries to protect my privacy. Don’t. Unless you are paying for private registration, the entries in your domain registry need to be valid. If you have invalid information in your domain registry, if someone reports it you may face fines from your registrar.

Once you have your domain registry filled with the correct, valid entries, lock it. A registry in locked status can not be transferred or altered. You wouldn’t leave the house unlocked when you go on vacation, would you? Protect your domain by keeping it locked.

The best advice is to keep domains you care about with a registrar separate from your hosting services. That way you never need to worry about them being hostile about releasing your domain should you ever decide to seek hosting elsewhere.

All the horror stories I have ever heard about people having their domains snatched away from them included a caveat. They had all let their domain registries expire. Your registrar is not required to hang on to your domain for you until you get around to renewing. If you let your domain expire, do so at your own risk.

Keep your registry valid, keep it locked, and register domains you plan on keeping for several years at a time. It’s good insurance against you being the victim in a “stolen” domain horror story, and Google likes to see sites that are registered for long terms.

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