Shaun Whynacht explains why business owners need to own their domains and hosting directly, not let developers control them. You can lose access to your site or have it held hostage if someone else owns the account. He walks through domain transfers, pointing domains to hosts, and using multiple domains for landing pages.
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What really surprises me is how many people don't fully understand how their domain and their website work together. So in this video, I am going to explain in very simple terms how this works so that you have a better understanding. And why am I doing this? I'm doing it because as a business owner, this is a very important entity that you need to have control of and you need to understand. So let's first break it down and we're going to use some visuals here. So Let's say this box that I have here is your website. Now your website is hosted on what's called a server. So web hosting. So if you go to, let's say GoDaddy or SiteGround or any of those different sites and you buy web hosting, you are essentially renting a parking spot to store all the files for your website on. Now that hosting. Is not accessible unless there is a domain. So let's use this little ring here as a domain. Now your domain is what you type into a web browser. So in, in our case, a Client Connector, it's clientconnector.app. That is the domain that we had. Now you can buy multiple domains and you can point them all to the same website. And that's a common thing that you see people doing when they're trying to reach out to different industries. So what we end up doing is you take your domain, which you purchase as well, and usually you buy that on a yearly basis. Um, and once you own that, it's just like having a business phone number. Once you own that, you can point it to any website hosting account that you own. So in our case, we're going to take our Client Connector app and we're going to go into those domain settings and we're going to say, hey, point to SiteGround, which is where we host our website. Or in our Client Connector app, we actually will host that domain and run it through that one. So then we point that to the Client Connector. Hosting account. So it's now when people go to your website, they go to your hosting. Let's say you want to change your hosting. No problem. You just buy a new one somewhere else, transfer all the files to that new one, and then go into your domain settings and say, now instead of looking here, we're going to look over here. And that's as simple as it is. Now, why did I bring this up? Well, because a lot of people don't understand how those two are separated, but also The other part is who owns your hosting? Who owns your domain? Who is that account registered with? A lot of times when you work with a web developer that designs your site, they will buy the hosting in their name. They'll buy the domain in their name, and they will rebill you for that. I will stand here today in this video and say, you need to be able to own your own stuff. It is like giving the keys to your business to someone else. If they go to business or they, you know, decide to, to move on somewhere else or, you know, anything else happens, you don't have that key to your business. And then the domain comes up for renewal and what happens? Your site goes offline because nobody paid the bill to the registrar where your domain sits. So be insistent whenever you're working with someone that is designing or registering for you, they register it in your business name with you as the contact and you having your credit card on file so that when it renews, it's with you and you know how to log in and update it when that card expires. So very important to do that. So just getting back to, to another part of this is, you know, let's say you are a landscaping company. And you know, your business is, you know, Dave's Landscaping. Well, you're going to want to try to get a domain that says Dave's Landscaping, probably not available right now. Because it's very generic, but regardless, you're going to want to have one in your business name. Now you're going to start to do, let's say, some marketing and you want to build a landing page that is targeted towards getting people to use your services to kickstart their lawn for spring. So instead of using maybe Dave's Landscaping, you're going to have a separate domain that you might buy just for that, that may say Kickstart Your Lawn with Dave or something like that. And maybe you're going to run some ads on Google or Facebook or radio ads or print, and you're going to want to send them to that domain because it's very specific to it. Well, you can point that domain to a separate page of your website. Or a landing page if you're using something like Client Connector. Because what you want to do is when people go to that, you know, Kickstart Your Lawn with Dave, you want them to learn exactly what it is that they were coming there for. They want to know about that kickstart package, right? They don't want to come to your homepage and have to look around because that's going to make them confused. They're going to get distracted. It's not a great user experience for you or for them. So Take what I, what I said here today and think about that in your business. Think about, do you have access to your domain right now? Do you have access to your hosting? Doesn't mean, hey, can I just log into my WordPress site? I mean, can you get into where the billing settings are for that hosting account? Can you get into where you can change the settings for your domain, whether it's GoDaddy or any other, other site that's out there? If you can't, find out how you can get that. And you can do what's called a domain transfer. And I'll just, before I wrap up the video, I want to tell you what, what this works like. No, let's say, you know, you worked with a web hosting company and they say, well, it's on our account. Well, ask for a transfer. And what that means is they will unlock that domain and it gives an authorization code. And you will then be able to go to say GoDaddy. It's the easiest one to remember and use. And you will go in and look for the option to do a a domain transfer. You put in your website address, it's going to tell you it's unlocked and it's going to ask you for that authorization code. Once you do that, process it, it'll take usually a couple of days, but that domain will now move from their account into yours and it's not going to take your site offline. Okay. Unless you decide to take the hosting into your own account and buy a new one. In which case you got to have the site's files transferred over. But in most cases, just transferring the domain is probably your number one top priority because hey, if the site goes offline or the hosting goes offline, you could build a new site. But if you lose that domain and somebody purchases it, and that happens, there are people out there that, that make a whole business around looking for expired domains. Purchasing them and then basically holding them hostage for ransom for you to buy it back. And you don't want that to happen. You know, when they expire, they'll go in a grace period of about 30 days, but after that, they just go back to the market for people to buy and snatch back up. So make sure you have access to all your assets. It's extremely important. And if you want some, some help with building your landing pages and your sales, check us out at clientconnector.app. We are a full functional CRM system, uh, that is dedicated to helping you automate your marketing, automate your business, get organized, and get more time back in your life.
