Who owns your domain name? Check before you need it

You decide to move your website to a new host, or switch your email to a new provider. The new company sends a request to approve the domain transfer, and the approval email goes to a designer who retired in 2021, or to the Hotmail address of a manager who left three years ago. Nothing moves until that person replies, and you have no idea whether they still read that inbox.

The domain name is the one part of your website you cannot rebuild. A site can be redesigned and an email account can be recreated, but both of them point at the domain, and whoever holds the domain holds both. It is worth ten minutes to find out who that is while nothing is on fire.

Two things that sound like one

A domain has two layers, and they go wrong separately.

The registrant is the legal holder of the domain: the person or company named on the registration. If the registrant is “Dave Smith Web Design” rather than your limited company, then on paper the domain is Dave’s, however long you have paid for it.

The registrar account is the login at the company that sells and renews the domain, such as 123 Reg, GoDaddy, IONOS or Namecheap. That account is where the renewal is paid, where the settings that point your domain at your website and your email live, and where the transfer approval emails come from.

The two can disagree. Your company can be the registrant while the account belongs to your old designer, who bought the domain for you alongside forty others. Or the account can be in your name with a contact address nobody checks. Either way, the person who can log in is the person who can change things, renew them, or let them lapse.

What goes wrong when it is in the wrong hands

Most of the time nothing happens, which is why this gets left. The problems arrive at the worst moment.

The renewal fails. Domains renew once a year, or every few years, against the card on the account. If that card is the designer’s and they stop paying for clients they no longer work with, the domain expires. Your website and your email stop on the same day. Registrars keep an expired domain aside for a few weeks so the holder can renew it, but if the reminders go to an inbox nobody reads, that window passes quietly and the domain goes back on sale.

You cannot move. Changing host, changing email provider or handing the site to a new agency usually means changing settings in the registrar account, or moving the domain to another registrar. Both need the account holder. If that is somebody you have lost touch with, the project stops until you find them.

There is a disagreement. A designer who is owed money, or who feels badly treated, holds the address your customers know you by. Most never do anything with that. The ones who do can hold up the business for months, and the formal routes to win a domain back exist but are slow and cost money.

Expiry is also what the fake renewal letters prey on. Scammers send official-looking invoices for domain “renewals” that move your domain to them, and an owner who does not know which company holds the domain has no way to tell the real reminder from the fake. Our post on the fake emails that target website owners covers what those look like.

How to find out who holds yours

Start with a public lookup. For a domain ending .uk or .co.uk, use the WHOIS search on Nominet’s website, since Nominet runs the UK register. For a .com, use ICANN’s lookup at lookup.icann.org. Type the domain in without the www.

The result shows the registrar, the date the domain was first registered and the date it is due for renewal. Write the renewal date down. Since GDPR came in, the registrant’s name and address are usually hidden, so the lookup tells you where the domain is held rather than who holds it.

To get the name, follow the money. Search your bank and card statements for a payment to the registrar the lookup named. If you find one, the business pays for it and probably has an account. If you find nothing, somebody else is paying, and that is usually the designer or agency who built the site. Their invoices to you may have included a line for “domain renewal”.

Then log in, or find out who can. Inside the registrar account, check four things:

• The registrant name. It should be your business’s legal name, written exactly as it appears at Companies House if you are a limited company, or your own name if you trade as a sole trader.
• The contact email. Renewal reminders and transfer approvals go here. Use an address you control, and preferably one that does not sit on the domain itself: if the domain lapses, email on that domain stops too, and the reminders telling you so never arrive.
• Auto-renew and the payment card. Auto-renew switched on, against a card that will not expire before the renewal date.
• Two-factor authentication on the login. The registrar account controls your email, which makes it worth protecting as carefully as your bank.

Moving it into the business’s name

Do this while everybody is still on good terms. A former designer who would help you in an afternoon today may be harder to reach in two years, and a request made in a hurry tends to go worse than one made in a quiet week.

If the registrant is wrong, ask the registrar to change it to your business. The current registrant has to agree, which is the part that needs a friendly designer. For a .uk domain the registrar records the change with Nominet. Get the agreement in an email so there is a record of it.

If the account is somebody else’s, move the domain to an account of your own. For a .uk domain the old account holder changes something called the IPS tag to the tag of your new registrar, and the domain moves across with no code and usually no charge. For a .com and most other endings they unlock the domain and send you an authorisation code, which you give to your new registrar, and the transfer completes in a few days. A .com transfer usually adds a year’s renewal at the new registrar’s price.

If nobody can log in, contact the registrar’s support. They will want proof that the domain belongs to the business, such as company documents and an invoice or bank record showing the renewal payments, and the process takes longer than a password reset. If the account email was a mailbox on your own domain that has since been deleted, recreating that mailbox and requesting a reset is often the quicker route.

Before any move, write down the domain’s DNS records: the entries that send visitors to your website and send mail to your inbox. Some transfers reset them, and a domain that arrives at its new home with empty settings means a website that does not load and email that bounces until somebody puts them back. Your current host or email provider can tell you what they should be.

If the person holding the domain refuses, there are formal routes: Nominet’s dispute service for .uk domains and a similar international process for .com. Both work, and both take weeks and a fee for the expert decision. An email sent today costs nothing.

The short version

Look up your domain, find out which company holds it, and check that the name on it is your business and the login is yours. If either belongs to somebody else, ask them to move it while they are still happy to help. It is a quiet job that saves you a frantic week later.

If you would like somebody to check it for you, along with the rest of your site’s basics, ask for our free website review. And if you are planning a move to our Care & Hosting, the migration is free, and checking where the domain sits is part of planning it.