Who actually owns your domain name? How to check in ten minutes

Your website, your email address and every link anyone has ever shared to your business all depend on one small thing: the domain name. If it lapses, all three stop working at the same moment.

Most business owners we speak to know roughly where their domain came from. Far fewer can say whose name it is registered in, when it renews, or which email address the renewal reminders go to. Those are the three things that matter, and you can check all of them in about ten minutes.

Owning it, paying for it and controlling it are three different things

It is easy to assume that if you pay for the domain, it is yours. Not necessarily.

• The registrant is the person or company the domain is registered to. This is what "owning" a domain actually means.
• The account holder is whoever can log in to the registrar (the company the domain was bought from) and change things.
• The payer is whoever's card renews it.

In a tidy setup these are all you, or all your business. In a lot of real setups they are three different people: the business is the registrant, a former web designer holds the account, and the renewal is on a card that expired two years ago.

Step 1: look it up

Every domain has a public registration record. For .com, .eu and most other extensions, the ICANN lookup will show you the registrar, the creation date and the expiry date. For .pt domains, use the search on DNS.PT, the registry that runs .pt. For .co.uk, Nominet runs the equivalent.

Do not be alarmed if the registrant's name is hidden. Since GDPR, personal details are usually redacted. What you are looking for at this stage is the registrar and the expiry date.

Step 2: check you can log in

Find the account at that registrar. Can you log in yourself, today, without asking anyone? If the answer is "my web designer does that", that is fine as long as you trust the arrangement and it is written down somewhere. It is not fine if you have no way to reach them.

Once you are in, look at three things:

• The registrant details. Is it your business name, spelled correctly?
• The contact email. This is where renewal notices and transfer approvals go. If it is an old address, or someone else's, change it.
• Auto-renew. Switch it on, and make sure the card on file is current.

Step 3: find out where the DNS lives

The DNS settings are what point your domain at your website and tell the world where to deliver your email. They are often managed somewhere other than the registrar: at your host, or at a service like Cloudflare.

You do not need to understand the records. You just need to know where they are, and that someone you trust can change them. If your website moves, or your email provider changes, that is where the work happens.

If the domain is in someone else's name

This is more common than it should be, and it is usually an accident rather than anything sinister. A designer registered it for you years ago, in their own account, because it was quicker.

The fix is normally a polite request: ask them to change the registrant to your business, or to transfer the domain into an account you control. Do it while everyone is on good terms. If it has gone wrong and you cannot reach the person at all, the registrar is your next stop. Keep anything that shows the domain has been used for your business: invoices, old emails, the website itself.

If a domain has already expired, act quickly. Most extensions have a grace period during which the existing holder can still renew, but the length varies by extension and registrar, and after it ends the domain can be released to anyone.

How we handle domains

Since we would be asking you to check this with anyone else, it is only fair to say how it works with us.

If you already own your domain, it stays yours throughout. We point it at the website we host for you, and if you leave, it goes with you.

If a domain is included with a Website Plan, we register it and hold it for your use while the plan is active, and renew it as part of the subscription. You can ask us to transfer it to you under a separate agreement, paying the registry and transfer fees we tell you about first. The full detail is on our website ownership page.

The ten-minute checklist

• Look up the domain and note the registrar and expiry date.
• Log in to the registrar account yourself.
• Check the registrant is your business.
• Update the contact email to one you read.
• Turn on auto-renew with a valid card.
• Find out where the DNS is managed, and who can change it.
• Write all of this down somewhere you will find it in three years.

Common questions