I own two domain names, pccad.co.uk and pc-cad.co.uk
They are currently registered via my website developer with someone called Fasthosts.
I want to transfer them both to Freezone where I have some other domain names registered and which are under my control.
I have no log in details for Fasthosts and my incompetent web site developer wants silly money to transfer them for me (actually he says he doesn’t control one of them which is odd as I certainly don’t!).

I know nothing about how all this works, I just want control over my domain names without having to pay money to the developer.

Help!!

Call Fasthosts?

They won’t let me until I have a support ticket number and I can’t get one of those till I have log in details!

Contact Nominet and tell them that your hosting company are being arses about your domain. They helped me out when a company tried to steal my domain.

A quick Whois suggests that they are registered in your name, though the addresses are different. I would suggest a call to Fasthosts explaining the situation and asking them for help. You may have to go to their offices to prove your identity. Other than that it’s time to get legal

How much is ‘silly money’ just to give some perspective on the situation.

Silly money is perhaps the wrong phrase – when I transferred them to the developer originally all it took was an email to ask for the IPS tags to be changed. Other things have gone on so I don’t feel inclined to pay him anything for sending a simple email!

PC-CAD.co.uk is registered to me via Fasthosts, the other one is also in my name but the address is Fasthosts head office – that’s the one which the developer man says he no longer controls which I don’t understand.

But does the developer manage the domains? That is what we do – all the domains we manage belong to the client but we manage them (ie, we ensure domains don’t lapse etc).

We normally would happily assign management to someone else without fee but if the client has historically been an arse we might charge 30 minutes of admin time (£35 + VAT).

No arsiness involved, certainly not from my side 🙂

I’m less than impressed with his service but I’ve not raised it as an issue. The biggest problem was that he miss spelt a contact email address on the web site (which he’d previously pointed out me as being a common mistake!) which meant that all my advertising was wasted as customers couldn’t contact me. Like I said though, I’ve never made an issue of it.

I no longer use the web site (and haven’t used it for some time) so management is not needed, I just wanted the names back so i can use them in the future if needed.

It is a huge phaff – I have done it myself so I can understand your web guy charging for it. Whatever you do, don’t let payment lapse while this is going on, as companies exist whose sole purpose is to hoover up recently lapsed domains and then charge silly money to buy them back.

You really are better off managing domain registration yourself, as long as you have enough knowledge to sort the names and locations.

One of the reasons he might want paying is fasthosts fees. Im sure one of my domains was registered there by its original owner and when I transferred it I found out they wanted paid for every tiny change. Obviously how they make their money!

If you own the domains create a Nominet account and force the transfer from there. Change of registrar is £10+vat.

Good news is that neither domain is going to expire for a few months at least so you’ve got time.

So you transferred them to Fasthosts with the developer but did he have to pay for any renewals and do you owe him any money? TBH, if you owe him, it’s not unreasonable he wants his money before giving you the domains. Anyway…

The easiest thing is to contact Fasthosts and prove (with a copy of your passport etc) that you’re the owner and assuming there are no outstanding invoices should let you transfer out. If not you need to speak to Nominet and ask them how to proceed. This sort of thing is VERY common so they have processes and in theory, it’s up to the developer to sue you for any unpaid invoices, not for Fasthosts to deny the owner their domains. I work for a registrar and we’ve done this a lot over the years.

Finally, try logging into this page with your email address because if he didn’t change the address on the registrant details, you can log into the site and do the tag change from there.

Thanks for all the help gents.

I wasn’t keen on moving the names over to him in the first place as I thought something like this might happen. He put quite a lot of pressure on me to do so though.

I wasn’t aware of the people who hoover up recently expired domains – i was thinking of letting them run out and just buy them again but maybe not!

There are no outstanding invoices as I told him 18 months ago not to renew anything.

I’ve contacted Nominet, just waiting for a reply.

I wasn’t aware of the people who hoover up recently expired domains

They only really do it if your site ranked well on Google or has generic/imported keywords in it. The days of domain tasting are long gone.

Well many thanks for all your help. I contacted Nominet who were incredibly helpful. They gave me access to my account after I’d established my ID, then I was able to change the IPS tag to move both names over to Freezone. So it’s all done and dusted

Good news.

Try considering having a separate domain registrar like iwantmyname.com from NZ. Very help bunch. I use them.

Not all eggs in one basket or you will have massive headache when they hold you at ransom when you are scaling up etc …

But if it is a website that is not important or experimental then those all-in-one hosting sites are fine.