The annual Domaining Spain conference will be returning to the beautiful seaside city of Valencia in less than 90 days. Today I got a note from show founder Dietmar Stefitz filling me in how how things are progressing for the 2014 event that will run May 8-10 at the Hotel Sorolla Palace. 

This being Valentine's Day, Dietmar included a show related love story I had not heard before.  Stefitz noted that he had a meeting at the start of this week with Nuno Soares (the former Sales Director at EuroDNS who is now the CEO at Hotel.mobi). Nuno has especially fond memories of the 2010 conference in Valencia. That year Stefitz had hired an exchange student from Poland to serve as one of the hostesses at the show. She and Nuno found they were a perfect match and, four years later, they are still together and very happy that their paths crossed that week at Domaining Spain (the show was known as DomainingEurope at the time, which is a topic we will come back to in a moment as it as at the heart of the hard "lesson learned" I referred to in the headline. 

Nuno Soares
CEO, Hotel.mobi

Dietmar Stefitz
Domaining Spain Founder 

Before we get to that I want to pass along the main reason Dietmar wrote - to let me know that the 2014 conference agenda is almost complete with many of the key speakers already lined up. Both traditional and new gTLDs will be given a lot of attention in Valencia. Ingrid Baele, a Vice President at electronics giants Philips will be there to talk about how the company plans to use its new brand gTLD - .philips. 

Ronald Schwaerzler (from .wien) and Anja Elsing will also be there to offer insight into what is happening with geo gTLDs and Carolin Silbernagl will discuss her group's community use of a new gTLD - .hiv. Many other speakers will be confirmed in the weeks ahead and registration is already open. 

Now, let's circle back around to that hard lesson learned. For years I have been telling people to never let a website designer (or anyone else) register your business domain in 

their name. I have seen too many people who have hired someone to build a website for them and also given them access to their domain (or even worse, let them register the name the company wanted in the vendor's name, assuming it would make things easier). Huge, colossal, don't ever do it mistake! In too many cases, after a business is up and running, the owner may decide to get someone new to keep their site up to date only to find that the original vendor won't turn over the domain - and once it is in their name or control getting it back can be very expensive if you can get it back at all.