Who Actually Owns Your Domain Name?

Here is a question most business owners cannot answer, and it takes about two minutes to find out: if the person who built your website stopped replying to emails tomorrow, could you keep your domain name?

Not the website. The domain. The address itself, the thing printed on your van and your business cards and the side of your shopfront.

For a lot of small businesses the honest answer is no, and they do not discover it until the worst possible moment.

Why this happens

It is rarely malice. It is usually convenience.

Someone builds your website in 2019. You are busy running a business and you have no interest in registrars or DNS, so they say leave it with me, and they register the domain on their own account with their own card and their own email address. Everything works. You pay them, the site goes live, and nobody thinks about it again.

Then one of these happens. They stop trading. They fall out with you over an invoice. They retire. They get ill. The renewal card expires and the reminder goes to an email address you have never seen. In each case the domain is legally theirs and not yours, and getting it back ranges from awkward to impossible.

The awkward version costs you a few weeks and some uncomfortable phone calls. The impossible version is that the domain lapses, someone else registers it, and your customers start landing on a page of adverts. Your Google rankings, your email addresses and every link anyone has ever shared go with it.

How to check, in two minutes

Domain registrations are recorded in a public database called Whois. It holds the registrant, the registration and expiry dates and the name servers.

For a .es domain, go to dominios.es, the official registry run by Red.es, type your domain and press Comprobar.

For .com, .co.uk and most others, any Whois lookup will do. Your registrar almost certainly offers one.

Two things to be aware of before you panic at the result.

First, since data protection rules changed in 2018, registrars hide the personal details of individual registrants. You will often see redacted or a privacy service rather than a name. That is normal and it is not evidence of anything.

Second, and more usefully: Whois will not always tell you what you need. The reliable test is not the public record but the account. Ask yourself whether you can log in to the registrar, see the domain, and change the payment card. If you cannot, you do not control it, whatever the public record says.

The three questions that actually matter

Forget the technical vocabulary. Ask your web person these three, in writing, and keep the reply.

1. Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be your name or your company's name, not theirs and not their agency's.
2. Which email address is the administrative contact? It should be an address you can open today. If the renewal notice goes somewhere you cannot read, you will find out the domain expired when the site goes down.
3. Can I have the login, or can you move it to my own account? A straight answer here tells you most of what you need to know about who you are dealing with.

Anyone reasonable will answer all three without fuss. Hesitation is the finding.

What to do if the answer is wrong

Do not start by accusing anyone. In most cases this was set up carelessly rather than deliberately, and the fix is administrative.

You have two routes.

Change the registrant. The domain stays where it is and the name on it changes to yours. For a .es domain this needs confirmation from the current administrative contact, so it only works if they are cooperating.

Transfer it to your own account. You open an account with a registrar of your choosing, the current holder gives you an authorisation code, and the domain moves. This is usually the better option because at the end of it you hold the account, not just the name on a record.

Neither is expensive. A domain transfer typically costs about the price of one year's renewal, and it usually extends your registration by a year in the process.

If the person holding it has genuinely vanished, contact the registrar directly and explain. Registrars have dispute procedures. They are slow and they will ask you to prove the business is yours, which is far easier if you have invoices, trade-mark registrations or a business registration in the same name.

Do this even if nothing is wrong

If the answers all come back correct, spend ten more minutes doing three things.

Turn on auto-renew. Most domain losses are not disputes, they are forgotten renewals.

Check the expiry date and put it in your calendar with a month's warning, independently of any reminder email.

Make sure the card on the account is one that will still be valid in two years. An expired card is the single most common way a working business loses a working domain.

Common questions

Is the domain included in what I pay monthly?

It depends entirely on the arrangement, so ask. In ours it is: the domain is registered in your name, renewal is covered by the monthly fee, and if you leave you take it with you. That last part is worth confirming with any provider before you sign anything.

My website and my domain are with different companies. Is that a problem?

No, that is completely normal and often sensible. The domain points at wherever the site is hosted. What matters is that you can access both.

Can I move my domain without my site going down?

Yes. A transfer changes who bills you for the name; it does not by itself change where the site is served from. Done in the right order there is no interruption at all.

How long does a transfer take?

Usually a few days. There is a mandatory waiting period on most extensions, and a domain registered or transferred within the last 60 days generally cannot be moved again yet.

The short version

Go and look now, while it is quiet and nothing is broken. Two minutes today is a great deal cheaper than a fortnight of emergency phone calls in a year's time.

If you find out the answer is wrong and you would rather someone just sorted it out, we do this regularly as part of building a website, and we register domains in the client's name as a matter of course. Tell us what you have found and we will tell you honestly whether it needs fixing.