Never Give Control of Your Domain Name to Anyone Outside Your Company

Protect Your Domain Name

Never give control of your domain name (like www.awpcomputers.co.uk) to anyone outside your company.   It’s one of the most crucial elements of your business’s on-line identity, and central to your brand.

Your IT supplier should have access to your website and email to resolve any problems, but make sure your domain name is owned and controlled by your company, and not by your IT supplier.

It may seem strange than an IT Support Provider (IT supplier) is penning an article on the subject of never giving control of your domain name to anyone outside your company.  However, I've seen two examples in the last week where companies we've been work with have had issues stemming from their domain ownership.

Domain Names: World Wide Web

Your IT supplier should be working with you to help your business

Based on recent evidence, a number of IT service providers seem to almost hold their customers to ransom with 'God like' control over systems and access to them.  This is not the way!  The relationship between you and you IT company should be mutually beneficial, and you should ultimately be seeing a return on your investment, based on efficiencies the arrangement can bring.  Above all else an IT support provider should be transparent, and always involve in what they doing, even if you don't want to know the minute details of how it all works.

Domain Names

A domain name is an important factor to consider when setting up and running your business in a digital age.  It helps your customers identify your brand on-line and ties together your sales, marketing and communication actives through your website and email.

A domain name is broken down into individual components, such as top-level domains, second-level and lower level domains.  It ultimately provides a human friendly address, which is easier to remember than a set of numbers, to a resource on the Internet.  The easiest way to think of domain names, is that they are almost like a virtual phone directory, providing a look-up between the numbers the computers use (called IP addresses) and the more memorable words humans prefer.

Whilst this article talks about 'ownership' of domain names, in reality, your company is effectively renting a domain name for a specific duration, which can typically be anything from one to ten years.  You do this by a process of registering a domain.  You normally make a choice of the top-level domain(s) you want to use, such as .com, .uk & .co.uk and then, provided it is available, make a choice on the second-level domain you would like to use for your website and email.  For example, the awpcomputers part of awpcomputers.co.uk

Registering a Domain Name

The process of registering a Domain Name can be daunting for the uninitiated, and this is were it's likely many people will turn to an 'IT expert' to help them out.  By all means, enlist somebody to 'help' you with the process, but always ensure that any registrations are made in your company's name, with your company's address and at most the IT person (or their company) is registered as the 'technical' contact.  If you don't make sure your domain name belongs to your organisation, it can lead to disputes and problems in the future.

There are many companies available to register your domain name with.  These are know as Registrars, and include agents such as 1 and 1, Easily or 1-2-3 Reg.  A official will have something called an IPS Tag (...not ISP, that's something different).   For example, Easily's looks like this:

     Easily Limited t/a easily.co.uk [Tag = WEBCONSULTANCY]
     URL: http://www.easily.co.uk    

An IPS TAG is a way of Nominet (the not for profit company who governs the .uk domain names) giving control of a domain name to a specific company.  For example the domain name www.awpcomputers.co.uk currently has the IPS TAG, as per the above example, of WEBCONSULTANCY.  It is possible to move your domain to a different registrar, after you have registered it, if you chose to.  However, there will likely be a fee.

Do I have a Problem with My Domain Name?

Hopefully, you're reading this article prior to registering your domain name and taking heed of the advice about making the registration in your business' name.  If you're not, and you already have a Domain Name you're concerned about, don't worry there are steps you can take to reclaim rightful ownership if you have a problem.

To find out about your domain name, if you don't already know the details of the registration, you can use a process called WHOIS to determine who the IPS Tag holder (the Registrar) is, who the domain name is registered to and for how long.  Many of the Registrars provide a facility to do this free of charge on their websites.  There is also a facility to do this on the Nominet website.  This is known as the WHOIS Tool and can be access (currently) from the following page:

• Nominet WHOIS Tool - http://www.nominet.org.uk/uk-domain-names/about-domain-names/domain-lookup-whois/whois-tool

As mentioned previously, Nominet UK is a non-profit company and is in control of the .uk domain name registry.  In this capacity, they are able to help with domain name problems or disputes.  Even if you do not register your company's Domain Name, and have don't have access to the account with the Registrar, if you have been using the Domain Name for your business' on-line activities, and it is obviously linked to brand or companies name Nominet can help you get your domain name back.

Using Nominet's Services

In recent weeks we worked with a company that had allowed an unscrupulous IT support provider to register their domain name on their behalf.  The IT company had registered the Domain Name using their email address & password.  They had kept ownership of the Registrar account, domain control panel and were not allowing the company, which we are now working with, to log-on and make changes.  Fortunately, in this specific case, the domain had be registered in the proper company name and address.  We were able to help our new client in their discussions with Nominet, and with Nominet's guidance were were able have a direct dialogue with the Registrar.  We were able to send proof of one of the Director's identities, specify a new email address to use for control panel access and in turn the Registrar sent them a new access password.

In this case the whole process took less then a day, and Nominet advised us that, if the Registrar did not comply, they would be able to assist us.  There would have been a small admin fee for them help us with the process.

If you are in a worse position than this, and your IT company has totally ownership of your domain, there are still things you can do, but the process will take longer and ultimately resolving the dispute could be much more costly.  For more information please have a look at the Nominet web site.  Potentially you could use Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) to help resolve .uk domain name disputes.  This can be found on the following page:

• Nominet DRS - http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/when-use-drs

If you would like some FREE help and advice with any aspect of registering a Domain Name or enlisting the help of Nominet, please don't hesitate to give AWP Computer Services a call, on 01772 698078, or contact us through our website.

3 Simple Steps to Backup Your Data

Three Easy Ways to Back-up Your Business Data 

As an IT consultant, who is very passionate about helping small businesses become more efficient through their technology, I’m always emphasising the importance of data.  The simple fact is that without your data, or your customer data, you have no business.  Although vital to the running of your business, the subject of data is both boring and complicated.

In reality, it doesn’t have to be complicated at all, although I doubt anybody can make it any more exciting!

Many business owners are confident that as long as their computers are working properly, then their data is safe.  It will always be there, waiting to be accessed and used.

The problem is that while using your computers your files are constantly being opened, written and re-written to and then closed.

All of this often causes files to corrupt, not to mention the accidental deletions or amendments that are a constant hazard.  More importantly the storage media that they are written too in not reliable in the long-term.  For example hard drive develop disk errors, and will ultimately fail.

With all of this in mind, here are three simple suggestions that will help you ensure your precious data is backed up, while keeping the processes required to do this as simple as possible.

1 – USB Memory Stick (flash drive)

This is by far the simplest and most basic method of backing up data.  USB memory sticks are available from many outlets, including supermarkets, and can be purchased for less than £15 for 32Gb of storage space.

In operation, all you need to do is plug the memory stick into a USB port on your computer, open your file browser (such as Windows Explorer) navigate to your working folders (like 'My Documents' or your 'Desktop') and copy the most important data onto the stick.  The memory stick will display as a new drive letter on your computer, probably the letter E or onwards e.g. (E:).

Top tip: Ebuyer is a good place to look for USB Flash Drives online.

• www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/USB-Flash-Drives

32Gb USB Flash Drive

2 – An External Hard Drive (HDD - Hard Disk Drive)

Using this method (an external hard disk) is almost as simple, but slightly more expensive.  Also often connected by cable into the USB port, but the disk size ranges from 50Gb up to 3Tb.  The pricing is usually from about £40 to over £200 respectively.

In operation you would use it in the same way as the USB stick, or use the software that often comes bundled with the external HDD when you buy it.  However, the software is often complicated and usually unnecessary.  If you know where your files are on your computer, and where you want to put them on the external storage drive, then 'drag and drop' (...or 'copy and paste') are often as complicated as it need to get.

Top Tip: Ebuyer is a good place to look for External Hard Drives online.

• www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/Hard-Drive---External

3Tb High performance USB 3.0 storage solution

3 – The 'Cloud' - Dropbox/Google Drive/MS OneDrive/etc.

The simplest way to take advantage of cloud storage is to use your online quota to backup your data.  Usually, when signing up for one of the more popular cloud storage providers (such as Dropbox, Google Drive or MS OneDrive) you’ll have free storage space already allocated to you.  This may be ample for your needs.  However, for a monthly fee you can have upwards of 15Gb, per person, available to use.  The main thing about back-up, if it's not to complicated for you, is to focus on the critical files (documents) and make sure you are backing up those.  They may well come within your free quota.

These 'Cloud' services will have locally installed app that synchronises your important files up to the cloud.  In operation, you will just open the locally installed app and drag the data you want to backup into the app location.

Dropbox/Google Drive/MS OneDrive

IMPORTANT NOTE

Perhaps I should have opened with this comment?
Whichever method you choose, do not be misguided in thinking that transferring your data onto the new storage solution is the answer to protecting your precious data.  It's important that any back-ups you make are a copy of your data, and the back-up means it is stored in a least 2 places.  I have seen far too many people use a pen drive as their only storage medium, only to be 'heartbroken' or worse when they discover all their data has been lost!  Don't learn this lesson the hard way!

SUMMARY

I hope that this short article has opened your eyes to how simple the first steps to keeping your precious data safe can be.

Although the suggested methods are both simple and cheap, in the long-term, they are only really suitable for consumer use.

If you take your business, your customers and the data seriously, then it really pays to have a more robust, professional data backup solution, which is provided by a professional technology provider.  With this you will get guarantees about your data's security and Service Level Agreements protecting you against data loss.

If you’d like to talk further about your data storage and security, or any other ways your technology could help your business become more efficient, please get in touch with AWP Computer Services to discuss your options.

CALL AWP Computer Services on 01772 698078

Google Apps Website Visitor Contact Form to Email

Use a Google Apps Form to capture and email website visitor contact information

Following on from our previous article, which explained how to set up a Google Apps Form to capture the details of a visitor to your website that wants to get in touch with you, we outline how the from can be added to your website.  This Blog post also explains how and where the data is captured, and how the enquiries can be emailed directly to you Gmail Inbox.

The first article was titled "Google Apps Form for Website Visitor Contact" and can be read at the following web address:

• http://blog.awpcomputers.co.uk/2014/09/google-apps-form-for-website-visitor.html

Adding a Google Apps Form to your web page