Dispute over concept of the Dating website
A Christian Dating Website was recently launched in Swaziland, the Website TPTower was launched by local web designers Aqua Designs. However Todays Times of Swaziland reports that :
There is now a battle over the concept of the Christian online dating website.
This comes after the founder of The Tower of Prayer Ministry, Kenneth Nkambule, distanced his ministry from the locally developed online Christian dating website because he believes it should have been shut down, but has suddenly reappeared.
Nkambule said the website’s domain name, www.tptower.org, and the whole concept, was his creation for The Tower of Prayer Ministry, a ministry which he says to date is still run by him.
“I approached Aqua Designs with the website design for my online Christian ministry for them to host the website (uploading the design to the internet) and this was in January last year,” said Nkambule. He said initially the website was to preach online as well as provide prayer to members of his church.
“It was then that I decided on the online dating concept which I attached onto the site, but later discarded that idea as the Holy Spirit was against it,” explained Nkambule. “My ministry then experienced financial constraints and, therefore, couldn’t pay my subscriptions to the website host which led to the site being suspended on the net,” he said.
That almost sums it up. I did a simple whois search of the domain and realised that the domain is actually registered in the name of the web designers which means legally they are the owners of the domain and are entitled to use the domain as they wish which is lesson number one for website owners.
Most website are shocked to learn that they don’t legally own their own domain names. After all, they paid to have the website created in the first place, plus pay ongoing fees for web hosting and domain registration. How can they not be the owner if they’re footing all the bills?
What commonly happens is that when your web design company created your website, they took care of registering the domain for you. While registering the domain however, they listed themselves, not you, as the Registrant (i.e. owner).
Why would they do that? Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I suppose it’s possible that they just don’t know better. A more cynical view, however, would be that they do it to keep you “hostage” to using their services forever (or at least make it difficult for you to switch).
Would you give a construction company the title to your land?
If all this talk about domains and contacts is still a little fuzzy, let’s compare it to a more familiar situation. Say you’re having a house built. Imagine that the builder said to you, “Hey, just sign your deed over to me so that I can take care of all those annoying details like applying for permits, etc. But don’t worry, I’ll let you live on the land after the house is built and use it just like you still legally owned it.” You’d think that was a ludicrous proposition of course, regardless of how well you knew and trusted the builder.
Well, the same goes for letting somebody else own your domain, regardless of how much you trust them.
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Afrigator
This is a good website on Christian dating. Thanks.