Getting started

Have an expert manage your domain

Having a domain name is a basic fact of doing business in the age of WiFi zones and smart phones but the truth is, if your business is baking pies, you should be able to bake pies without needing to know how to update a DNS zone file or setup an email mailbox.

When it comes to managing your domain, you have a choice – manage your domain yourself, or have a third-party manage it for you.

One option is to give a third-party or technical expert access to your domain’s management features without giving up ownership and control over your domain.

Let an expert take care of your domain

Many people in this situation just have their technical expert, whether in-house or a third-party, manage the whole process from start to finish. The pitfall of is, of course, that when you part ways with that expert, they may be the legal owner of all of your online assets – your domain, your website, your emails.

When you opt to have someone besides you manage your domain name, you can give them administrative or technical rights for your domain.

You can give them permissions to manage and edit domain information, manage DNS, buy or renew domain on behalf of your company, change your domain’s owner, or any combination of these different permissions.

Similarly, if you want your accountant to be able to pay for orders but not create email mailboxes, for example, you can give them rights to do only what they need to.

Make sure you’re still the owner

However, it’s very important to make sure you’re still the owner of the domain.

Don’t give anybody else rights that they don’t need. Even if you’re not a technical person yourself, you should still have the power to control who has access to what.

If you’ve already delegated some rights to a third-party and aren’t sure if you’re the owner of the domain, you can check the Legal contacts section under the domain in your Gandi account, or you can do a WHOIS search.

The WHOIS is a database that lets you see the owner and other contacts on a domain name.

If you’re not the owner and should be, you should have whoever you’ve given owner rights change the owner contact to you right away.