Domain ownership

It kind of depends upon what specific business relationship you want to have with your clients, and/or a specific client. In my situation, building websites is not my 9 to 5. I can commit to build a site at a given time, but cannot commit to being available a year from now when they want a major revision.

My business model is based around delivering turn-key sites with documentation that anyone can use to expand the site. My contract states that copyright (on layout/features, not content) and ownership is mine until final payment is received, then the whole thing goes to them.

All my sites are hosted separately (reseller hosting is a different line of business that I don't want to get into). After final payment is received, I walk them through setting up a hosting account (using WH4L lately as I get a percentage) and then take them over to Registerfly and have them set up a registration account. I then transfer my registration of the domain to them.

Domain renewal is not always smooth. Liability to renew the domain name is in their hands, not mine. I don't get sued if the renwal doesn't happen. One of my recent web hosts was using Spam Assasin which blocked registerfly. Luckily I caught the fact that reneal notices were not getting to me, but it could have been ugly.

what we do is register all the clients stuff under our company CC etc... and host it all with the hosting provider that we've been working for forever, and then charge them a CC processing fee of about 8 or 10%.  this has a few benefits

1) if they mess around on payment for anything, we can just put their website on hold

2) they're more likely to return for maintenence and design services in the future

3) we can easily update security / patches / tech improvements

4) we can manage all domains from one admin acct (corporately)

the downside is, of course, if a client leaves we have to do all the messing around of transferring / releasing stuff.  but we charge for it. so...

c

kcwebmonkey:

we usually put ourselves as contacts ofr everything (admin / billing / etc..) figuring that if they're gonna switch they'll switch everything .  plus most of our clients are outside the u.s. and don't have credit cards and really just want someone to take care of them the whole time.  and an admin contact in the u.s. is way handier than having it be some little street no one's ever heard of in cairo.

christopher

Even if I registered the domain in my client name as the Registrant, Admin, Billing, ..etc, he can't transfer it by any way but after my authorization... I don't know if it is the same to you, but I have a reseller control panel from www.onlinenic.com allows me to change any info about any domain name I registered, and transfer it to anywhere even without their approval... i can also change any details later even the registrar name..

BUT

I register it with their names, because they are sometimes bothered if they didn't see their name in the WHOIS search, as long as i have the authority on the domain, it doesn't matter which name is written on it.