About

What This Site Is

Hartzer.net is a reference on domain name security, theft, recovery and disputes. It explains how domain names are taken, what the recovery mechanisms actually are, how the dispute policies operate, and — just as often — where those processes fail and why.

The audience is mixed on purpose. You may be a registrant who woke up to find a domain gone and needs to know what happens in the next few hours. You may be an attorney evaluating a matter who needs the technical vocabulary before you can evaluate anything else. You may be security or IT staff trying to harden a portfolio before there is an incident. Every technical term on this site is defined inline the first time it appears, because a registrar (the company a domain name is registered through, and the party that executes transfers) is obvious to some of you and opaque to others.

It sells nothing. There is no product, no subscription, no affiliate arrangement with a registrar or a monitoring vendor, and no engagement offered anywhere on it. That is not modesty about the business — it is what makes the content usable. A page that recommends a registrar is a page you have to discount.

Who Writes It

Bill Hartzer has worked as a search engine optimization and domain name consultant since 1996. He is the founder of Hartzer Consulting, a search and domain name consultancy based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, and the founder of DNAccess, which works on stolen and hijacked domain name recovery.

The two disciplines are less separate than they look. A domain name is the load-bearing asset under a search presence, an email system and, in many organizations, the authentication that gates everything else. Anyone who has spent the years since 1996 building traffic and authority onto domain names tends to develop firm opinions about what happens when someone else takes control of one. That is the perspective this site is written from.

Guides here are written in the first person where experience is the point — where the useful thing is not the policy text but what actually happens when you invoke it. Mechanism is described in the third person. There is no "we" on this site, because there is no editorial team; it is one person's account of a body of work.

The Work Behind the Content

The recovery practice is the reason this reference exists. Most of what is written here — the sequencing in the first twenty-four hours, the reasons registrar escalation stalls, the difference between a case that is recoverable in a week and one that will take a year — comes out of handling incidents, not out of reading policy documents.

Bill reports that he has recovered more than 500 stolen domain names. That figure is his own count, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not independently auditable: domain recovery work is confidential, a large share of it is pre-litigation, and many matters resolve without anything ever being filed publicly. You should treat it as a self-reported number, which is exactly how it is presented here.

For the same reason, no client, no matter and no individual recovery is named anywhere on this site. Where a real pattern is worth describing — and the patterns are the valuable part — it is described structurally: what class of failure it was, what the registrar did, what evidence mattered. Never who.

Expert Witness Work

Bill serves as an expert witness in domain name and internet matters, retained by counsel on either side of a dispute. In broad terms that role involves examining the technical record — registration and transfer histories, DNS (Domain Name System, the distributed directory that maps names to servers) configuration and its changes over time, registrar account activity, archived site content — and reducing it to findings an attorney, a judge or a jury can follow.

The discipline that work imposes is visible throughout this site. An expert's opinion is only as good as the record it rests on, and anything that cannot be traced to a source gets struck. So facts here are stated in the form they can be checked in, self-reported figures are labeled as self-reported, and where the honest answer is that a question is unsettled or jurisdiction-dependent, the page says so rather than manufacturing a clean conclusion.

Nothing on this site is offered as testimony, as an opinion in any pending matter, or as legal advice. It is background.

How This Site Is Written

A few editorial rules are applied consistently, and they are worth stating because they explain the omissions you will notice.

• No named clients or matters. The work is confidential and much of it is pre-litigation.
• No prices or fees. Registry redemption charges, dispute filing fees and registrar service charges all change. Cost is described structurally — that a redemption fee sits well above a normal renewal, for instance — rather than numerically, because a number published today is wrong within a year and wrong in a way you cannot detect.
• No brand rankings. Stating which registrars offer registry lock (a registry-level hold that blocks changes until an out-of-band verification is completed) is a fact worth publishing. Ranking registrars is marketing, and the moment this reads as an affiliate site it stops being worth citing.
• Willingness to say a thing is a bad idea. WHOIS privacy on a portfolio you may one day have to prove you own is a genuine trade-off, not a free upgrade. Pages here take positions like that where the evidence supports one.

Content is reviewed against primary sources — ICANN policy, registry operator documentation, IETF specifications, dispute provider rules — rather than against other articles.

What This Site Does Not Do

This site does not take engagements, does not review individual situations, and does not provide legal advice. It is a reference, and a reference is a poor substitute for representation when a domain name is actually gone.

Domain disputes are jurisdiction-specific and frequently time-sensitive. Deadlines in transfer disputes, registry grace periods and statutes of limitation all run whether or not anyone is watching them, and if you are working from a general article you can lose a right by waiting. Where a situation calls for professional help, the guides on this site say so plainly and generically rather than routing you anywhere.

Consulting and expert witness inquiries are handled separately from this site, through Bill's practice at hartzer.com. Nothing published here should be read as an offer to represent, advise or act for anyone.