I have been building, rebuilding, and launching websites for my clients for almost 15 years and when I am being interviewed by a potential client, they will tend to be more focused on costs and time as opposed to being concerned about assets and their access.

Assets and access are simply ownership of domains, site files, art files and access to hosting and administration rights to a current site. Some of the questions I will ask are if they “own” the domains, where are the domains registered and if they know their hosting company. You would be surprised at how many do not have ownership of their own domain and that they do not have access to the hosting account. More times than you think.

But all is not lost. There are a few tools that will give me some of the information in order to strategize and come up with solutions in case we find that they indeed do not have ownership or access.

Once of the most useful tools to figure out who owns a domain, where it is hosted is https://whois.domaintools.com/, I actually do preliminary search so I will be prepared. I will also research previous site versions by using the Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org. This site is an archival platform that will provide various versions of a site domain. It has been quite useful when having to recreate or access information that the client is seeking to provide when they do not have site files or access to old hosting.

If I find that the client does not own their domain, I will come up with alternative domains that are similar. This is not a bad thing, I almost always find a better domain and in doing so will allow me to also acquire client’s own hosting so that moving forward they will now have complete access and ownership of their own business domain and website.

I also find that in a lot of cases the previous web master was either unknowingly negligent when setting up the client and often times the website is also not adequately optimized and not visible. So in essence, it would be like starting over but only better, because the client will have complete ownership, access and a better performing website once I complete the process of new hosting, new domain and properly search engine optimized.

Looking for solutions to your website woes? Please contact me @ 443-540-9884.

Stellar Online Services

SEO, SEM Account Manager

Over 30 Years of award winning and successful advertising, internet, and digital media management as well as effective website and landing page design for human visitors and search engine optimization.

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