If you want to get noticed as a business – or even for personal reasons – you need to be online. While social media and other profile-based websites are good, the best method is to have your own website.
This makes perfect sense, as it establishes a place to call your own which, in turn, gives you full brand recognition – where as social media would lose your image in the websites own branding, as well as everyone else trying the same thing. Of course, if you want to own your own place online, you need to know a few things about running a website.
Instead of the basics, this is going to look at some of the legal aspects and ways to protect yourself – including data escrow.Once you get a loyal fan-base, this is important as you don’t want your website to come down by accident or to have yourself locked out due to a piece of software not working.
Keeping Your Domain
Before you can do anything else, you need to get a domain and keep it. If you want somewhere easy to find, you want a “.com” or other top-tier domain names. To keep these, however, you need to follow regulations set out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN).
As part of keeping your domain, ICAAN requires you to submit daily amounts of WHOIS data into a secure escrow account. This data escrow is simple in practice but it is a legal requirement.
It will submit registry data from your website into a secure account for holding. Most times, this won’t get used but it’s there when such situations do crop up. Even if it wasn’t a legal mandate, it is better to have it than not as it protects your asset and backs up certain data.
Using Software
Likewise, creating and managing a website is easy in today’s world, thanks to useful and helpful software. Unfortunately, if you use this, your dependence on that software becomes paramount. Yet you only own a license, not the product – if something goes wrong you can’t get into the source code and fix it yourself.
As such, you can turn to escrow again to help. If you find a software provider willing to put their code in escrow, you know they will want to protect their property and keep your service working. If it doesn’t, the escrow agency already has the code for you.
In short, it’s a win-win situation that gets your much-needed software back quickly.