.com or .co.uk? For a UK business, take the .co.uk and add the .com if it is free. Both work the same way in a browser and for email, so the choice takes about five minutes. Finding out who actually holds the name once it is registered takes longer, and it is the part that decides whether the address is still yours in five years.
Who owns .co.uk: Nominet and the registrars
Every .uk address, including .co.uk, .org.uk and the shorter .uk, sits in a registry run by Nominet, a UK company that has looked after it since 1996. According to Nominet’s own help pages, there are over 10 million .uk names. You never buy from Nominet directly. You buy through a registrar, a company accredited to sell names in the registry, and that registrar is who you deal with from then on.
The .com is different. It is a global name, run under contracts with ICANN, the body that sets the rules for generic endings like .com, .net and .org. The practical effect is that the rules on renewal, lapsing and transfers differ between the two, and both come up below.
The difference between .com and .co.uk, and which to use
The difference between .com and .co.uk is not technical. Both work the same way in a browser and for email. What differs is who runs them, which rules apply when you renew or move the name, and what the ending tells a customer about where you trade.
.co.uk is the one most UK customers expect from a local business. It says where you trade, which is useful information if you are a plumber in Stockport and less useful if you sell worldwide.
.uk on its own has been available since June 2014. For five years the holder of a .co.uk had first refusal on the matching .uk, and Nominet ended that right on 25 June 2019. If your .uk twin is still free, it costs little to register and hold alongside the .co.uk, though you do not have to use it as your main address.
.com is the global default. If you trade abroad, or your customers are likely to type .com out of habit, it is worth owning. If you only trade locally, it is mainly defensive: owning it stops someone else putting up a site on your name with a different ending.
The decision most people actually face is narrower. If the .co.uk is free, take it. If the .com is free too, the cost of holding both is small, and you can point the second at the first so there is one website. If the name you want is taken in every form, choosing a different name now is cheaper than spending years explaining a hyphen over the phone.
Is .uk the same as .co.uk?
They sit in the same registry, run by Nominet, and they are separate names: you register each one on its own, and each has its own renewal. A .uk is shorter, and a .co.uk is the ending most customers already recognise. If you have a .co.uk already, the .uk is optional, and holding it is mostly about stopping someone else from using it.
What it costs, and the renewal trap
Prices below were checked in October 2026, excluding VAT.
- IONOS advertises .co.uk and .uk at £1 for the first year, then £10 a year, and .com at £1 for the first year, then £15.
- Cloudflare sells domains at the wholesale price with no markup, in US dollars: a little over $5 a year for .co.uk and .uk, and about $10.50 for .com, the same at registration and renewal, according to the tracker at cfdomainpricing.com.
- Nominet itself, if your registrar has stopped trading and you have to renew through it directly, charges £80 plus VAT for a .uk renewal. That is not a price anyone chooses; it is the price of having nobody looking after the name.
The pattern to watch is the first one. A £1 first year is a real offer, and the renewal at ten times the price is also real. Neither is unreasonable for a domain you will keep for a decade, but compare suppliers on the renewal price, because that is the one you will pay every year after this one. Some registrars also bundle email or a website builder into the renewal, which is worth noticing before you agree to it. If you are unsure whether a builder suits you at all, Wix, Squarespace or a web studio sets out the choice. The domain is one line among a website’s running costs; how much a website costs in the UK adds up the rest.
A .uk name can be registered for between one and ten years at a time. Paying for several years does not protect you from forgetting. Auto-renew does, provided the card on the account is still valid. An expired card is a very ordinary way to lose an address.
Who owns the domain: registrant and account
There are two separate questions, and confusing them is how most domain problems start.
The registrant is the person or company named in the registry as the domain’s holder. Nominet describes the registrant as the legal owner of the domain name. Whoever is named there owns the name, whoever paid for it.
The account is the login at a registrar where the domain is managed. A web designer or agency often holds many clients’ domains in one reseller account. That can be perfectly sound: the domain can sit in their account with you named as the registrant. It can also sit in their account with them named as the registrant, which is a different arrangement entirely.
Neither is automatically wrong. Plenty of suppliers register domains for their clients as part of a service, and some hold them in their own name for a fixed period. What matters is that you know which arrangement you have, and that it is written down. Three questions cover it:
- Whose name is it registered in? Yours, your company’s, or the supplier’s.
- If it is not yours, for how long, and what moves it to you? A date, a number of payments, or the end of the contract.
- What does it cost to leave early, and do you keep the name if you do?
If you already own a domain, it should stay registered to you. Someone building or hosting your website needs access to point the domain at their servers, not ownership of it, and nothing about running a site requires the registrant to change.
How to check whose name it is in
For a .uk name, Nominet’s lookup tool shows the registrar and their contact details. By default it does not show the registrant’s name or address, so the public lookup tells you who to ask, not who owns it.
The reliable check is Nominet’s Online Services. Nominet sets up an account automatically for the registrant of every .uk name, and you log in with the email address used to register the domain. If you can log in and see your domain there, you are the registrant. If no email address you use works, the registrant is probably somebody else, or an address nobody reads any more.
For a .com, ICANN Lookup shows the registrar, but ICANN notes that personal data in the results may be redacted. Ask the registrar, or ask whoever set the domain up to show you the registrant details in their account.
Check that both addresses go to one place
Most domains answer twice, with and without www. Type both into a browser.
One should send you to the other, and the address bar should change to show it.
If both stay as typed and show the whole site, there are two copies of your site
on the internet, and search engines have to work out which one to show.
This is common, and we found it on our own sites. When we checked in October
2026, the www versions of teialoom.com and of two of our clients’ sites each
served a full copy rather than redirecting; our third client’s site redirected
correctly. Every copy told search engines which address was the real one, so
nothing was lost, but it is untidy, and the fix belongs with whoever controls the
domain’s settings: one redirect rule, permanent, from www to the address
without it, or the other way round. Ask your supplier which they have set up.
Moving it, and what happens if it lapses
If you are the registrant of a .uk name, you can change registrar or transfer it to someone else through Online Services, for £10 plus VAT, if your registrar cannot do it for you. Nominet still recommends asking the registrar first.
For a .com, ICANN’s guidance for domain holders says the registrar must give you the transfer code within five calendar days of asking. It also warns that changing the registrant’s details can lock the domain against moving registrar for 60 days, so move first and update the details afterwards.
If a .uk name is not renewed, Nominet’s expiry timeline gives you 30 days in which the registrar can still renew it as normal, then a redemption period to day 90 in which it appears on Nominet’s public list of names about to drop. From day 90 it can no longer be renewed, and on day 95 it is deleted and anyone can register it. Nominet also notes that a registrar’s own process may suspend the website and email earlier than that.
For a .com, ICANN’s Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires reminders roughly a month and a week before expiry. After the name is deleted, there is a 30-day redemption period in which it stops resolving and can be restored through the same registrar, at a fee the registrar has to publish.
Either way, the reminders go to the registrant’s email address. If that address belongs to someone who left three years ago, nobody receives them.
How we handle it, including the part that favours us
We register domains for clients, so we are one of the arrangements described above, and it is fairer to say which one than to leave you to work it out.
A domain you already own stays yours. If you come to us with a name already registered to you, we ask for access to point it at the site, never for the registration. An existing registration cannot be moved to anyone without the registrant agreeing to it, and we would not ask.
A domain we register for you is in our name for the first 24 months. We build the site with nothing to pay up front, and holding the site and the address for two years is what makes that possible. From the twenty-fourth monthly payment both are yours, and we transfer the domain at no cost. If you leave before then, you owe nothing, and the site and that address stay with us. If we stop trading before your twenty-fourth month, both pass to you at that point. All of this is in our terms, which is where you should read it rather than here.
A real one. NTB Damp Proofing, a damp proofing and plastering firm in Heswall, paid on 7 September 2026. We registered ntbdampproofing.com through Cloudflare that day, at the wholesale price above, and the site was live on it the next day. It is in our name until NTB’s twenty-fourth payment, and then it is theirs.
It is a .com, against the advice at the top of this article, and the reason is this article. NTB had a website before, and the .co.uk it used is still registered to the person who built it. Getting it back would have meant asking for it, and NTB decided a .com they could have that day was worth more than a .co.uk they would have to chase. That is a reasonable call, and it is also the cost of not knowing whose name your domain is in: the business that has used a name for years can end up without it.
The short version
Register the .co.uk, and the .com if it is free. Compare renewal prices rather than first-year prices. Turn on auto-renew and keep the card current. Know whose name the domain is in, and make sure the email on the registration is one you read.
If somebody else registers or holds a domain for you, that can be a fair part of a service, provided the terms are in writing: whose name, for how long, and what it costs to leave. If you are not sure what your current arrangement is, our free audit of your existing site includes checking where the domain is registered. There is more on this in what you are actually buying and how to read a website quote, and if the person who set it up is no longer answering, see your web designer has disappeared.
If you want someone to look at your own website, the free review tells you the three things we would change first.
