Do you reallyown your domain?
Your web address carries your website and your email. Plenty of businesses find out too late that it was never in their name, or that it quietly ran out. Here is how to check yours in ten minutes.
Your address is rented
Nobody owns a domain outright. You rent it a year or more at a time, through a company you pay, called a registrar. For addresses ending in .uk, the register itself is kept by Nominet.
The person or business named on the record is the registrant. In law, that is who holds the address. It is not necessarily whoever pays the bill, or whoever has the login.
Whose name is on it?
Very often it is not the business. It might be the web designer who set the site up, a director in their own name, or someone who has since left. If they stop renewing, fall out with you, or simply retire, your website and your email go with them.
Ask whoever you pay for the domain to show you the registrant name. It should be your business's exact legal name, and the email address on the account should be one your business will always read, not one person's inbox.
If it is someone else, ask them to move it to you. For a .uk address this is a registrant transfer, and the current registrant has to start it. Keep a written record of asking.
What happens when it runs out
For an address ending in .uk, nothing seems to happen at first. The registrar can still renew it for 30 days. Then Nominet suspends it, and your website and your email stop working. It can still be renewed until 90 days after it ran out. After that it is cancelled, and anyone can register it.
Other endings such as .com follow ICANN's rules. Registrars must remind you about a month and a week before, may give up to 45 days' grace, and must stop the address working for a while before deleting it. After deletion there are 30 more days to get it back, usually with a much bigger fee.
How businesses lose them
Rarely through anything dramatic. Usually it is one of these:
- The card on the account expired, so the automatic renewal failed.
- Reminders go to an old email address nobody reads.
- Fake renewal letters are common, so real ones get ignored.
- The person who registered it has gone, and nobody knows the login.
A ten minute check
- Who is the registrant? It should be your business.
- When does it run out?
- Is it set to renew automatically, and is the card on file still valid?
- Does the email on the account reach someone who will act on it?
- Does the registrar login have a second step, such as a code on your phone?
- For endings other than .uk: is the domain locked against being moved without your say so?
How Mendbird helps
The free check reads your domain's public record: when it runs out, which company it is managed through, and, for endings other than .uk, whether it is locked against transfer.
On a Watch plan we look again every morning, and email you a month before it runs out, then again a week before if it still has not renewed. The same goes for the padlock certificate that keeps your site secure.
The registrant's name is usually kept private, so we cannot see it for you. That one is worth checking yourself today.