Your website design company wants control over your domain. They want to be able to host the website and its email.
But should you simply give them access and transfer your domain from your current registration company to your new website design company who will host it on your behalf?
Perhaps this ought to be considered as a business risk. If you part company with your design company they will retain the domain ownership. The data centre which they are using will likely consider them the owner of the domain and the content theirs too!
Its possible to keep ownership of your domain but give the rights for your design company to do the technical stuff for you.
How can you retain domain ownership and enable your development/design company manage your emails and website?
DNS is used to configure and advise the Internet where components of a domain are to be found. In it’s simplest this is the IP address of the mail servers and the web server.
The image above illustrates how the relevant aspects of the domain may be separated.
In the upper part all is managed in one point. The domain is registered and the website and email are hosted under the same management.
In the second example the domain registration is retained whilst the management of the website and email is given to another for management.
- Domain Registration – a registrar is used to register and own the domain – the business aspect of the domain.
- Nameserver – DNS name servers, IP addresses configured here for the location of the website and the mail servers. Also confirmation values for Google and Microsoft Office
- Website server
- Email server
Changing the value of the nameservers to pass them to your website design or IT support company allows them the technical ownership of the domain. they can manage the settings for where the website is located with their hosting and the details for the mail servers, amongst other options. Should they need to add additional info, such as a confirmation entry for Google, Facebook, or other it can be done with ease.
With the configuration above and the nameservers separated if you fall into dispute with the design company you are able to reset the values of the nameservers, drawing them back into your control. You can then enter into discussions with another design company and once again assign the nameservers to them for them to manage the technical aspects of the website.
There are other approaches which can be made, for example you may wish to give your IT support company the nameservers and for them to configure the IP address for the website to that given by the design company. They can also make relevant changes to use Microsoft’s and Google’s office provisions.
