Who actually owns your domain?

Of the businesses we look at, a meaningful number do not control their own domain name. Not because anyone acted badly — because a developer registered it during a project years ago and nobody revisited it.

It causes no problem at all, right up until it causes a serious one.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Your domain is not just the website address. It is also:

• Where your email lives. Lose the domain, lose every address on it.
• What is printed on your van, cards and signage
• What customers type from memory
• What years of search visibility is attached to

A website can be rebuilt in a fortnight. A domain you cannot access takes your email with it, and there is no rebuilding a name people already know.

Checking, in five minutes

1. Look it up. Search “WHOIS” plus your domain. You are looking for two things: the registrant (who owns it) and the registrar (the company it is registered through).

Privacy protection may hide the registrant. That is normal and not itself a problem — the registrar is the part that matters next.

2. Try to log in. Go to that registrar and attempt a password reset using an email address you control.

If a reset arrives and you can get in, you have access. If nothing arrives, someone else does.

3. Check the expiry date. WHOIS shows it. If it is inside ninety days and you are not certain auto-renew is on, deal with that before anything else on this page.

If the answer is uncomfortable

Do not start by accusing anyone. In almost every case this was administrative convenience rather than anything deliberate, and the person holding it will transfer without argument if asked plainly.

Ask for one of two things:

Transfer it to your own account. Cleanest. You open an account at a registrar, they release the domain with an authorisation code, and it moves. Usually under a week.

Or be added as an account owner. Less clean but acceptable if the relationship is good and ongoing.

If a supplier refuses outright, that tells you something important about the relationship, and it is better to learn it now than during a dispute.

The renewal trap

Domains expire. When one does:

1. It stops resolving. Website down, email down.
2. A grace period follows, then a redemption period with a recovery fee, often several hundred dollars.
3. After that it is released, and anyone may register it.

Expired domains in active use get picked up quickly. Recovering one afterwards ranges from expensive to impossible.

Turn on auto-renew, and make sure the card on file is current. An auto-renew pointed at an expired card is not auto-renew.

Getting it right from here

• The business is the registrant, not an individual or a supplier
• The registrar account uses a business email, not a personal one, and not one belonging to a supplier
• Auto-renew on, with a valid payment method
• Two-factor authentication on the registrar account
• The login is recorded somewhere that survives a laptop dying and a staff member leaving

That last point catches people. A domain nobody can log into is only slightly better than one somebody else owns.

Where we stand on this

We will register and manage domains, and clients frequently ask us to. But the business is always the beneficial owner, transfer assistance is always available, and we will never hold a domain as leverage over an invoice.

That is written into our service terms rather than being a promise on a page — because the businesses that need this guarantee most are the ones who learned the hard way that a verbal assurance is worth very little.