You Don't Own Your Domain

A client called me because their email had stopped. Not a few messages held up somewhere, but all of it, nothing in or out that day.

The website was down too, but email was the one that hurt. When we went to fix it, we couldn't get in, because the account that held everything was locked, and to unlock it the system wanted to send a code to the email address that was down. The key to the account was sitting inside the account.

It wasn't a hack, it was a credit card. The card that auto-paid for the domain had expired months earlier, the payment quietly failed, and the domain lapsed. Nobody got a call, because the account it lived in wasn't theirs.

That loop, the thing you log in with living inside the account you need to reach, is common enough that it gets its own post. Here, it's just why a lapsed card turned into a lost week.

Here's the thing almost nobody explains to the person paying the bill.

You're renting, and that's normal

You don't buy a domain the way you buy a car. You rent it, a year at a time, and it renews on a card sitting in some account. That's not a catch or a scam, just how every domain on the internet works.

Renting is fine; you rent your office too. The part that matters isn't that you're renting, it's whether the lease is in your name.

If the account that holds the domain is yours, you see the renewal notice, you see the card, and you get the warning before anything lapses. If it belongs to someone else, a developer, an agency, a company from years ago, then you don't see any of that. You just find out the day it breaks.

Where it usually sits

Most of the time, a domain ends up in one of a few places, and none of them involve anyone doing anything wrong.

A developer sets it up to get you live quickly and registers it under their own account, then folds it into your monthly bill. Easy and fast, right up until you part ways and the name your business runs on is in someone else's login.

Or you bought it through a builder like Wix or Squarespace, or through a designer's reseller account, which means there's a company sitting on top of the actual registrar, one more door between you and the controls.

Or it was set up years ago by someone who's long gone, renewing quietly on a card nobody remembers, at a company you've never heard of. I've picked up the phone and called those companies on a client's behalf, just to find out who was holding their domain.

It's the same shape every time: someone else is on the lease, and you're living there.

A lapsed domain isn't gone right away

This part is worth knowing, because it's the difference between a stressful week and a lost business.

When a domain expires, it doesn't disappear that night. For a while, usually a few weeks, you can still renew it at the normal price like nothing happened. After that it drops into a redemption window, where you can still get it back, but you pay a recovery fee, often well over a hundred dollars. Only after all of that does it get released to the public, where anyone can register it.

So a lapse is recoverable, right up until it isn't, and the whole time your site and email stay dark.

How to find out who actually holds yours

Two ways, and you can do the first one yourself in a minute.

Every domain has a public registration record. Look yours up on any "WHOIS" or domain lookup site. A lot of registrations are privacy-protected now, so it may not show a name, but it will usually show which company the domain is registered through. If that company is a surprise to you, that's worth a conversation.

The second way is to ask for the keys. Whoever manages your domain can hand you three things: access to the account it lives in, the domain unlocked for transfer, and the transfer code (sometimes called an auth or EPP code) that lets you move it into an account of your own. Someone working in your interest hands those over without any fuss, and if asking turns into a runaround, that in itself is your answer.

Your domain is yours

This one matters to me, and it's the same principle I hold for data. If you ever want to leave a developer, an agency, or a host, you should be able to walk out with your domain, your site, and your email, and set them up somewhere else. That isn't being difficult, it's holding onto the thing your business runs on.

You can absolutely pay someone to manage all of it, and you should, if that's not how you want to spend your time. Hand off the work. Just keep the lease in your name.

What to check this week

Three questions, and that's the whole audit.

Is the domain registered to you or your company, rather than your developer or agency?

Does the renewal notice arrive in an inbox you actually read, so you'd see it coming?

Could you log into the account that holds it right now, today, without asking anyone?

If someone else set you up and you can't answer all three, that's a friendly conversation to have this week. Not because anyone's out to get you, but because the day you need those answers is usually the day it's already too late to go find them.

You're always renting the domain, and nobody owns it outright.

Just make sure the name on the lease is yours.