Your web designer owns your domain, and you find out at the worst moment

The commonest website emergency we see is not a hack. It is a handover.

The site was built years ago by a freelancer or a small agency. It has worked ever since, which is why nobody has looked at it since. The domain was registered in the designer's name, because that was quicker on the day. The hosting sits on their reseller account. The email runs through the same server. And nobody in the business holds a single login to any of it.

None of this is visible while the relationship is good. It surfaces when the designer retires, stops answering, or sends a renewal invoice with a number in it that starts a conversation. By then every option is slower and dearer than it needed to be, and the business discovers that the thing it thought of as "our website" was, on paper, somebody else's property with the company's name on the front.

This is rarely malice

Worth saying early: the designer who registered your domain in their own name in 2014 was not plotting anything. Registering it themselves was the path of least resistance, you got a working website, and the arrangement suited everyone for a decade.

The problem is not the person. The problem is that a business asset is held outside the business, and the day that matters is the day the arrangement ends. People retire. One-person web shops close. Agencies get bought. An arrangement that depends on someone answering their old email address is not an arrangement, it is luck that has held so far.

The five-minute audit

You can find out where you stand this afternoon, without ringing anyone.

01Look up your domain in a WHOIS service and read who is listed as the registrant. It should be your business, at your address, not your designer or their company
02Check where the nameservers point. That tells you who actually controls the DNS, whatever the WHOIS says
03Ask yourself who holds the registrar login. Not who could probably get it: who could type it in right now
04Work out where your email actually lives. If it runs on the same server as the website, the two will fail together, and moving one disturbs the other

For a .uk domain, Nominet runs the register and offers a WHOIS lookup on its own site. For a .com, any registrar's lookup will do. It takes less time than reading this article.

If the registrant is your business and the logins are in your password manager, stop reading and go and do something else. You are fine, and you are rarer than you think.

Why this is expensive to fix late

If the registrant of record is your designer, then as far as the systems that run the internet are concerned, the domain is theirs.

That single fact drives everything that follows. Under ICANN's transfer rules, moving a domain between registrars has to be authorised by the registered name holder. If that is not you, the paperwork does not answer to you. The transfer process also has waiting periods built into it, so even a fully cooperative handover is not an afternoon's job.

If the registrant will not cooperate, or simply cannot be found, there are formal routes. Nominet operates a dispute resolution service for .uk domains, with mediation first and an independent expert decision where mediation fails, and a complaint turns on whether you have rights in the name, such as a trade mark. A process exists. It is measured in weeks and months, not days, and nothing about it is certain. We are not lawyers and this is not advice on recovering a domain; the honest summary is that once you are locked out, you are into a slow lane with a solicitor's number in it.

Every option you have before the relationship ends costs an email. Every option after it costs weeks.

Meanwhile the business is not abstractly inconvenienced. The domain is the website, and it is also the email. A lapsed renewal or a frozen transfer takes both down at once, and a company that cannot receive email is closed in every way that matters except the front door.

What a proper handover pack contains

The fix, while things are friendly, is not to storm off to a new supplier. It is to ask for a handover pack, and a good designer will not flinch at the request. The pack is short:

The domain transferred so your business is the registrant, or at minimum the registrant details corrected to your business with the registrar login in your hands.
The registrar account credentials, or your own account with the domain moved into it.
A note of where the DNS is managed and what each record does, including the ones that decide whether your email gets delivered.
Access to the hosting, and a copy of the site files and database, even if you never touch them.
A list of anything else tied to the domain: mailboxes, subdomains, certificates, and which of them would break if the site moved.

We build and host sites for clients, so we are the party this request gets made of, and the pack above is what we hand over. It costs us a client's dependency on us, which is the point. A supplier you can leave easily is a supplier you are choosing to stay with, and that is a better basis for the relationship than a login they keep in a drawer.

Around Knutsford and the rest of Cheshire, most small business sites were built exactly the way this article describes: by one local person, capably, years ago, with the domain registered wherever was quickest. If you do not know which side of the audit your business falls on, we will check for you. It takes minutes, and the good outcome is that we tell you everything is already in your name.

We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.