Who owns your website? Domains, hosting, and what happens when you leave

Trust7 September 202611 min read

Short answer: your website is three separate things — the domain name, the hosting, and the site itself — and they can each be owned by a different party without anyone lying to you. The one that matters most is the domain, because it is the address your customers, your van signage and your Google listing all point at. Whoever is named as the registrant holds it. Go and check that name now; it takes about a minute, and it is the single most useful thing in this article.

Three things, not one

“My website” sounds like one object. Commercially it is three, and they come apart cleanly:

• The domain name. yourfirm.co.uk. Rented from a registry, a year at a time, through a registrar. It is the only part customers memorise, and the only part that is genuinely irreplaceable — a new one starts from nothing.
• The hosting. The server that answers when somebody types the domain. Commodity, cheap, swappable in an afternoon if you have the files.
• The site itself. The pages, the code, the photographs, the words. Whether you own this or merely have permission to use it depends on what you agreed, and most trades never agreed anything in writing.

A firm can hold all three, or none, or — most commonly — the domain in the designer’s name and everything else on the designer’s account. That last arrangement is usually not malice. It is what happens when a busy person says “sort it all out for me” and the designer does exactly that, using their own registrar account because it is quicker.

How to check, in about five minutes

Do this before you read another word of anybody’s sales pitch, including ours.

1. Look up the domain

For a .com or .net, search your domain at lookup.icann.org. The Registrar field tells you which company the domain is registered through — that is who you or your designer buys it from. For a .co.uk or .uk, the equivalent record is published by Nominet, the UK registry.

Expect a partial answer. Registrant names and email addresses are routinely withheld from the public record for privacy reasons — look up almost any .co.uk and you will see the registrar named in full and the registrant’s details redacted. That is normal and not a red flag. What it does mean is that the public lookup tells you where the domain lives, not whose name is on it, so the second question below is the one that actually settles the matter.

2. Find out whose email is on it

This is the question that actually decides things. Renewal notices, transfer approvals and password resets all go to the email address on the domain record. If that address ends in your designer’s domain rather than yours, then in practice they control the domain no matter what the invoice says, because every recovery route runs through their inbox.

Ask your designer directly, in writing: which email address is on the domain record, and whose name is the registrant? A straight answer takes them ten seconds. The quality of the answer tells you most of what you need to know — the same way the answers in the questions worth asking a web designer do.

3. Check where the site is hosted and whose account it is

Not “which company” — whose account. Being hosted at a well-known host means nothing if the account is in the designer’s name with their card on it. Ask for the login, or ask for the site to be moved to an account you open yourself.

Why the registrant field beats the contract

Trades tend to assume the paperwork settles it: I paid for it, therefore it is mine. In a dispute you may well be right, and you may well win — eventually, at solicitor’s rates, on a job worth a few hundred pounds. Meanwhile the domain does whatever the registrant tells it to do.

Ownership of the name in the registry is not a moral position. It is an operational one. The registrant can move the domain, point it somewhere else, let it lapse, or simply do nothing while you wait. That is why the field is worth more attention than the terms and conditions.

What your rights actually are — .com and the like

For .com, .net, .org and the other generic domains, transfers between registrars run under ICANN’s Transfer Policy, and the registrant’s FAQ (Name Holder FAQs) is unusually readable. The parts worth knowing:

• Moving registrar needs an authorisation code — also called an Auth-Code, EPP code or transfer code. Your registrar must provide it within five calendar days of you asking.
• A registrar may charge a fee for the transfer, but cannot deny the transfer because you have not paid that fee.
• A transfer can be refused inside 60 days of the domain first being registered, or inside 60 days of a previous transfer, and must be refused during a 60-day change-of-registrant lock. These are real waits, not stalling tactics.
• You have the right to transfer an expired domain. A registrar cannot make you renew first purely because it has lapsed — though once deletion has actually begun, it has to be restored before it can move, and that usually costs.
• If your designer is listed as the administrative contact and that is holding things up, and you are the registrant, you can ask the new registrar to send the authorisation form to you instead.
• If you believe a registrar is breaking these rules, ICANN takes complaints directly.

Notice what every one of those rights has in common: they belong to the registrant. If that is not you, none of them are yours.

.uk domains work differently

Most UK trades are on a .co.uk or .uk, and those run under Nominet rather than ICANN’s registrar transfer process. There is no authorisation code. Instead every .uk domain carries an IPS tag — a short code naming which registrar currently holds it. Moving registrar means changing that tag to the new one.

Two practical consequences. First, the tag change is normally made by the registrar that currently holds the domain, which is precisely the party you may be trying to leave. Second, and much more usefully: Nominet lets the registrant manage the domain directly through its own account rather than going through the registrar at all — and the way you prove you are the registrant is by receiving an email at the address on the domain record. Which brings you straight back to question two above. The email address on the record is the key to the building.

One more thing worth knowing: tag changes are actioned immediately and cannot be undone from your side. If a tag is moved to the wrong place, getting it back means asking whoever now holds it to move it again.

Owning the site itself

The domain is the urgent bit. The site is the expensive bit, and the position is murkier because almost nobody writes it down. Three situations:

• Built on something standard. A conventional site — files, content, a database if it needs one — can be copied to another host and picked up by another developer. You may still not own the copyright unless it was assigned to you, but you have something portable, which is most of what matters in practice.
• Built on a subscription platform in your account. Squarespace, Wix and the rest are perfectly respectable, and if the account is in your name you can carry on without the designer. What you generally cannot do is take the design somewhere else — the pages live inside the platform. Stop paying the platform and the site stops.
• Built on the agency’s own system. Some firms build every client into one proprietary platform they own. This is not dishonest and it is often genuinely good software. But there is nothing to hand over. Leaving means rebuilding, and the quote for the rebuild is the real cost of the arrangement — a cost that never appeared in the original price. Worth reading alongside builders versus a built site, which argues the same trade-off from the labour end.

And the part trades forget: the photographs. If a photographer was commissioned, ask who holds the licence and whether it covers use anywhere or only on that site. Photographs of your own jobs, taken on your own phone, are yours and are worth keeping a copy of somewhere that is not the website.

What a fair arrangement looks like

None of this requires a suspicious mind or a solicitor. It requires four things to be true, and any decent supplier will agree to all four without argument:

• The domain is registered in your business’s name, with your email on the record.
• You can log into the registrar account, or the domain can be moved on request.
• Hosting is either your account, or moveable — you get a copy of the site on request.
• The monthly fee, whatever it covers, is not the thing keeping the domain alive. Those should be separable. What the monthly should and should not cover is set out in what a care plan actually pays for.

If a supplier resists all four, that is information. They may have perfectly good reasons. Ask what they are.

If you are already stuck

Work through it in this order. Most cases resolve at step two or three.

• Establish the facts before you argue. Look the domain up. Find out who the registrar is and which email is on the record. You cannot negotiate a position you have not checked.
• Ask plainly and in writing. One email: please confirm the registrant name and the contact email on the domain, and please provide the authorisation code or change the tag to X. Written requests date-stamp themselves, which matters if this goes further.
• If you are the registrant, use your rights. Five days for an auth code on a .com. Direct registrant access at Nominet for a .uk. Neither requires the designer’s cooperation.
• If you are not the registrant, negotiate rather than demand. An unpleasant truth: you are asking for something you do not currently hold. A reasonable payment to settle it cleanly is often cheaper than the alternative, however annoying that is.
• Know when to walk. If the domain is genuinely gone and the holder will not move, a new domain plus a properly built site is sometimes the faster, cheaper answer. It costs you the address, not the business — the phone number, the reviews and the reputation all survive.

Where we stand on this

We register the domain in your name, on your email, because the alternative gives us leverage we have no business having. The monthly covers hosting and looking after the site; it does not hold the domain hostage. If you leave, you take the address with you. That, and the fact that we build the site before we ever ring you, is most of what we actually do — you look at a finished thing rather than a promise.

The prices are published in full on the pricing section — £700 for a sole trader build then £65 a month, £1,500 then £145, £3,000 then £295, all excluding VAT. And if you are not sure whether your current setup is a problem worth fixing or just untidy, the Growth Diagnostic asks five questions and tells you what we would deal with first — including, quite often, nothing.

What we cannot tell you is that owning your domain will win you work. It will not. It just means that everything you do win stays yours.

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