The Registrant and Administrative Contact are the legal owners of the domain. It is important that this be your name (not your web developers name) in case you need to move your domain to another management company or defend it in a trademark infringement circumstance.

Types of Domain Listing Contacts

1. Registrant – the licensee of the domain name, the individual or company who has the right to use, sell or destroy a domain name. This should be your company name.

2. Administrative Contact – the appointed agent for all management functions. This needs to be an employee, director, or manager of your company.

3. Technical and Billing Contacts – these contacts are much less important and can either be within your company or the vendors assisting you.

Netdrafter always uses the customer as the Administrative Contact for domains we manage. Check up on your domain listing with our free Domain Listing Whois Lookup tool. You can also use this tool to search for additional available domain names or see who owns a domain you’re interested in. This tool, called Whois (pronounced “who is”; not an acronym) is a protocol for finding information about Internet servers and domains. Since this is a publicly available tool, we recommend using your business address for the listing rather than your home address. Home based business? Be safe and get a cheap PO Box address to associate with your business.

It is also legally important that your listing information be accurate and kept up to date. Did you know that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) requires you to update your domain name listing annually? Netdrafter updates the domains we manage automatically. If you’ve gone through another company however, you’ll need to contact them to get your listing updated.

On the subject of ICANN and trademark infringement, possession of a valid trademark is only one of three requirements that you need to meet to win ownership of a domain name. For more information on this topic, read ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

An effective way to protect your domain from mistakenly being sold or transferred to a competitor is to turn on a feature called “registrar or domain lock.” We lock all domains we manage by default. The lock prevents transfer to another registrar. If in the event a customer needs to change registrars, we unlock the domain for that purpose. We suggest that the new registrar turns the lock back on after transfer.

Have questions about domain ownership? Contact us and we’ll can point you in the right direction.

Need domain names or key phrases researched for best visibility?
Contact us for purchase, setup, and redirection!

1. Domain names have two audiences: web site visitors and search engines.
   - Use words bunched together for visitors (ex: sterlingpetsitting.com). They are easier to remember and look nice in advertising copy.
   - Use words separated by dashes (-) for search engines (ex: sterling-pet-sitting.com) and additional brand capitalization.

2. Choose domain names based on what customers will search for (ex: company name, industry terms, services, locality, your name).

3. Buy more domain names than you think you need. Worst case scenario: you keep them out of the hands of the competition.

4. Make the domain as easy as possible to remember and type.

5. Consider buying names with common misspellings (ex: Double character words (where the letter ending a first word is the same as the letter beginning a second word, like in the case of a company named “Project Trailblazers”) are often mistyped. The smart strategy is to purchase two domains: projecttrailblazers.com and projectrailblazers.com).

6. Buy similar names for redirection (ex: sterlingpetsitting.com, sterlingpetsitting.net)

7. Avoid trademarked names or names similar to existing companies.

8. If a specific domain name is already taken, try making a purchase offer. This can be done officially using a purchasing or backordering service or can be done unofficially by contacting the domain’s administrative contact.

Domain Standards

• Domains can contain letters, numbers, and hyphens.

• Domains cannot begin or end with a hyphen or use spaces or special characters. e.g. @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) ? “

• Names can be 2-67 characters in length (not including the ‘www’ or ‘http://’).

• Names are not case sensitive. (sterlingpetsitting.com is the same as SterlingPetSitting.com)

• Names can be registered for 1-10 years.

Need help in your domain name selection? Contact us with your list of possibilities and we’ll happily give you our opinion or suggest other possibilities.

Example:
In the URL http://www.mycompany.com/services/consulting.html
- “mycompany.com” is a domain
- “services” is a directory in that domain
- “consulting.html” is a file in the “services” directory

Types of Domains
As of this writing, there are 280 different domain name extensions. There are both generic domains (like .com and .net) and country domains (like .ca for Canada and .zw for Zimbabwe). Some domains have restrictions, like .edu (education) and .de (Germany) for example. You must run an actual institute of education to qualify for a .edu domain extension and will need to actually do business in Germany to obtain “mycompany.de”.

Domain Type Resources:
- List of Generic Domains
- List of Country Based Domains
- Domain Types Chart

While there are many domain extensions to choose from, Netdrafter recommends obtaining the following: (ordered from most desirable to less desirable)

Usage Statistics
The .com domain is by far the most popular and most recognized domain.

Need help selecting the right domain type for your business? Help is here! Contact us!