A joiner we spoke to found out who owned his domain in the worst possible way. The web designer who built the site in 2019 had stopped answering email, the domain renewal had failed, and the address that had been on every van and every invoice for six years belonged to nobody for eleven days before a broker bought it.
He had paid for that website every year. He had never owned the one part that mattered.
Four things, and they can belong to four different people
- The domain. Your address. Registered to a person or a company at a registrar, and whoever is named there controls it.
- The content. Your words, photographs and prices. Yours by default, unless a contract you signed says otherwise.
- The design. The template, theme or custom build. Usually licensed rather than owned, and rarely portable to another platform.
- The platform. Where it all runs. Rented, always, whether you rent it from a builder, a host or an agency.
Most people assume owning one means owning all four. It does not, and the gaps are where the trouble is.
The five questions
Ask them now, while nothing is wrong. Every one has a short answer and a bad silence.
- Whose name is on the domain? Not who pays. Who is the registrant. You can look this up publicly in a minute, and if the answer is your developer or your agency, that is the thing to fix first.
- Can I log in to the registrar myself? If access runs through somebody else's inbox, you do not control your address, and a person who stops answering email takes it with them.
- Where does the renewal notice go? A domain lost to a bounced email is the most common version of this story.
- Can I get my content out? Not a screenshot. Your pages, your customer list, your orders, in a file you keep.
- What happens if I stop paying? Every hosted product has an answer. The question is whether it is written down and whether you have read it.
The export test
The fastest way to find out how much you actually own is to try to leave for an afternoon.
Log in and look for an export. Any serious platform has one, usually in account settings, and ours is a button in settings that hands you your data. Download it and open it. If the file contains your pages, your customers and your orders in a format that means something, you are in a good position whatever else is true. If there is no export, or it produces something unreadable, you have found the real terms of the arrangement regardless of what the contract says.
The point is not that you are leaving. It is that a business you can leave is one you are staying with by choice.
The free subdomain question
Every builder offers a free address on their own domain, and it is genuinely useful for getting started, for testing, and for a project that is not sure it is a business yet.
It is also not yours. You cannot take it with you, the traffic and the links it earns stay behind, and it says something to customers that a business address does not. Buy the domain early, well before you need it, and point it at whatever you are using. Then the platform becomes a decision you can reverse. Free subdomain or your own domain covers the trade in detail, and how to choose a domain name is worth reading before you buy rather than after.
What to do this week
Ten minutes, once, and this stops being a risk:
- Look up your domain publicly and confirm your own name and your own email are on it.
- Log in to the registrar yourself. Change the password if it is shared.
- Turn on auto-renewal, and make sure the card on it is one that has not expired.
- Run an export from your website platform and put the file somewhere you will find it.
- Write down which of the four things you own, and who to ask about the ones you do not.
None of this is dramatic and none of it takes long. It just has to happen before you need it, because the day you need it is the day it is already too late. If you are weighing platforms partly on this, our pricing says what happens at each level, and the legal pages your website needs covers the other half of the paperwork nobody enjoys.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns my website?
Four things can be owned separately: the domain, the content, the design and the platform. Your content is yours by default unless a contract says otherwise. The domain belongs to whoever is named as the registrant, which is not always the person paying for it.
How do I check who owns my domain name?
Look the domain up publicly and read the registrant name and email. That takes a minute. If the answer is your developer or your agency rather than you, that is the first thing to fix, along with getting your own login at the registrar.
What happens to my website if I stop paying?
Every hosted product has a written answer, and the question is whether you have read it. The faster test is to try to leave for an afternoon: run an export and open the file. If it contains your pages, customers and orders in a readable form, you are protected whatever else is true.