Here is where you need to be a good consumer and know a little more about process.

You are owner of your domain name and owner of your website. Although most people grant their website designer or website administrator power to control all of this, and although most people do not understand technicalities of domains and hosting packages, you should still have all details readily available.

If you have a business website and delegated any of work involved in setting it up to another person, you should still maintain complete control over its future.

Whether you or someone else purchases domain name for your website (the www.yourname.com), make certain that you have contact details from company it was purchased from, and corresponding username and password to access control over domain's use. Most importantly, make sure you are listed as registered owner of website, not person or company that is creating your website for you. All registered domains have four contact individuals listed on Internet. Your web administrator can be listed as technical contact or administrative contact but you need to be listed as registered owner. This way, if any changes are made to status of domain, you are informed as well, and you should be notified when domain name is about to expire.

This is how my friends’ website was “stolen”. He was not listed as owner, and design company that was listed as owner went out of business. When domain name expired (remember, you purchase these for a limited time and then have to renew), owner did not know it and that particular domain name became available for anyone else to purchase – legally. Thus, my friends website was not really stolen. He was victim of ignorance.

Pre-registration and activation of domain names was introduced to make sure that complete sets of codes work and there are no gaps in structure that would break predictability. Once all recognized codes are present, a traveler or an industry professional can always receive a valid answer when using a recognized industry code in .aero. This is very good news for end-users, people as well as systems, because they can always "guess" what domain name to use based on their knowledge of industry codes, and access desired information quickly. Say, as a passenger, you use LA airport frequently, you know code is LAX, so you just type www.lax.aero and you are on web site of airport. That?s fast!

Pre-registration and activation also serves as a very useful tool for demonstration and testing of new concepts like minimum presentation standards for mobile and wireless devices.

Hans Peter Oswald https://www.domainregistry.de/aero.html