It’s a typical practice to entrust your website, ecommerce site, blog, and social media pages to a person or firm. They know the technology. Let them drive.
But that backfires when a disgruntled employee or a disgruntled contractor decides to withhold information regarding your website or your domain so that you don’t have access to it. If you’ve paid a lot to have it developed or if over time you’ve built up some ranking in the site, it can be quite damaging if you get cut off from it. It’s a little like kidnapping.
Here’s how to tell if you are in trouble. Go to a site like whois.net or any other site where you can do a whois lookup, and lookup your own domain name. In many cases, companies find out that their outside website designers own the name.
This practice also exists with Facebook pages and local directory pages. Get control of these.
Here are 7 ways to protect your company assets. You can’t start too soon on these.
- Buy your domain name in a registrar account that you own and control. Many companies leave the purchase and ownership of the domain up to the website designer. Do you trust them?
- Have your web properties built-in hosting accounts or hosting space that you control and own. This is the trust thing again.
- Find out who is managing your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn). Make sure that a trusted employee or you have access to those accounts and pages.
- Lookup your company locations on Google, Bing, and Yahoo local pages. Register to own these entries if you don’t already have control.
- Record all of the passwords for your registrar and hosting accounts in one place.
- Backup your website content regularly.
Over time, like real estate, all of these web assets have become more valuable and will continue to grow in value. Do you have other assets like that?