The Five-Minute Check Most Businesses Never Make

Most business owners assume they own their domain name. Quite often they don’t, and they find out at the worst possible moment: when they want to move host, change designer, or simply renew it and nobody can remember who set it up in 2014.

Owning a domain is not the same as using one

A domain name is rented, not bought. It’s registered to a person or company for a fixed term, usually one or two years, through a company called a registrar. Whoever is listed as the registrant controls it, regardless of who paid for it or whose business name is in it.

If your web designer registered the domain on your behalf using their own account and their own details, they are the registrant. They may be entirely trustworthy and hand it over the moment you ask. But if they retire, sell up, fall out with you, or simply stop answering emails, you have a problem, and it’s a problem that can take your website and your email address down with it.

How to find out where you stand

Start with a WHOIS lookup. Search for “WHOIS” and enter your domain. Some details will be hidden behind privacy protection, which is normal and usually fine, but you’ll still see the registrar’s name and the expiry date.

Then ask yourself two questions: do I have login details for that registrar, and does the account use my email address? If the answer to either is no, you don’t currently control your domain, whatever the paperwork says.

What good looks like

• The domain is registered in your business name, not your designer’s
• The registrar account is in your email address, one you’ll still have in five years
• You know the login details, or they’re stored somewhere your business can reach them
• Auto-renew is switched on and the payment card on file hasn’t expired
• Someone other than you knows all of the above

That last point catches people out. A domain in a sole director’s personal email account is a single point of failure for the whole business.

Getting it back

If your domain is held by someone else, ask politely and in writing for it to be transferred to an account in your name. Most designers will do this without fuss. The process involves an authorisation code and takes a few days, and it does not take your site offline if it’s handled properly.

If the person who holds it can’t be reached, it’s harder but usually not hopeless. The registrar has a process, it needs evidence, and it’s much easier to start while the domain is still safely in date than after it has lapsed.

Do this before it’s urgent

Checking takes five minutes and costs nothing. Sorting it out after a domain has expired, been bought by someone else, and taken your email with it costs considerably more than that. It’s the sort of tidying up that’s worth doing on a quiet afternoon rather than the morning you need it done.