Is Your website safe?

If your web host suddenly disappeared, would you be able to quickly re-create your site with a different host?

Or would you be like a friend of mine - sitting there completely stumped over how to start over from scratch?

For starters, your domain name should belong to you - with you listed as the administrator. If it isn't, get it changed as fast as you can - while the person whose name is there is still available to authorize the change. Otherwise, you could be in for months of proving who you are - honest.

This happened to me when I bought my first domain name - and had no clue at all about how it all worked. When it was time to renew we almost lost the name because the "administrator" had moved away. It took 4 years before I had that domain name in my own name, because we had to go through the whole proof process every 2 years until it "stuck."

Another friend of mine had an employee set up her website, and he was listed as administrator. That was fine - they were friends and he wouldn't have done anything to hurt her. But - he died. She had to go through proving that he was positively unavailable, and then proving that she had a right to the domain which was her company name. I think in her case it took about 3 months.

So start out right - put that domain in your own name.

Next, make sure that all of your web files are backed up on your own computer. Then back them up further on an external hard drive or even a disk.

My friend had someone else build her site because she knew nothing about how to do it. So when that person decided he no longer wanted to do it, she was stuck.

So be assertive - make sure you have a copy of everything. If you have to hire a high school student to come and help you understand it all, then do it.

Remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - and in this case, I think it's worth about a ton of cure.