Who owns your website's domain, and how to check

The .com on your truck, your cards and your Google profile belongs to whoever is named as its registrant, not to whoever paid for it and not to whoever’s account it sits in. Most business owners have never checked which name that is. It takes ten minutes, and it is a much easier conversation to have before you need the domain back than after.

Registrant, registrar and account

Domain problems almost always come from treating these as the same thing.

• Registrant

  Registrant is the person or company named in the registration as the domain’s holder. ICANN’s contracts call it the Registered Name Holder. This is the owner, in the sense that matters: the one who can renew it, transfer it and authorize changes.

• Registrar

  Registrar is the company the domain was bought through and is managed at, under a contract with ICANN. You never deal with the .com registry itself.

• Account

  Account is the login at that registrar. It can belong to you, or to a web designer who keeps many clients’ domains in one reseller account.

A domain can sit in your designer’s account with you named as registrant, which is a sound arrangement: they manage it, you own it. It can also sit in their account with them named as registrant, which is a different arrangement entirely. ICANN’s standard registrar contract says that a registrant who lets someone else use a domain is still the registrant of record. If the designer’s name is on it, letting you use the domain does not make it yours.

How to check whose name it is in

1. Look it up. Go to ICANN Lookup and enter your domain. Since January 28, 2025 it has used RDAP, the protocol that replaced the old WHOIS service for .com and the other generic endings. It shows the registrar, the creation and expiry dates and the domain’s status.
2. Expect the owner to be hidden. The registrant’s name and email are usually shown as “redacted for privacy” or replaced by a privacy service. The lookup tells you who to ask, not who owns it.
3. Log in to the registrar. If you have an account there and can see the domain, open its contact details and read the registrant name and email.
4. Or ask for it in writing. If someone else set it up, ask them to send a screenshot of the registrant contact from their account. A supplier with nothing to hide can do this in two minutes.

While you are in the lookup, note the status. “clientTransferProhibited” is a normal lock that the account holder can switch off when moving registrar; it is not a sign of trouble on its own.

The 60-day lock

ICANN’s guidance for domain name holders sets out three rules that catch people out:

The practical order, if you are both moving a domain and putting it in your own name, is to move registrar first and change the registrant details afterwards. ICANN’s board adopted changes to the transfer policy on June 7, 2026, including shorter locks, but they have to be implemented before registrars apply them. Until then, plan around 60 days.

Renewals, and letters that look like bills

Registrars accredited by ICANN must send renewal reminders roughly a month and again a week before a domain expires, under ICANN’s Expired Registration Recovery Policy. If a .com is deleted after expiring, there is a 30-day redemption period in which it stops working but the registrant can still restore it through the same registrar, for a fee. After that, anyone can register it. Auto-renew, with a card on the account that has not expired, prevents all of this.

The other thing that arrives is a paper letter headed something like “Domain Name Expiration Notice”, with your domain spelled correctly, a date close to your real expiry and a table of prices. It is not a bill. It is an offer to move your domain to the company that sent it, usually at a higher price, and paying it authorizes the transfer. The FTC took one of the best-known senders, Domain Registry of America, to court over its notices in 2003, and versions of the letter still circulate.

• Right renew from inside your registrar’s own account, reached by typing its address, after checking the registrar’s name in ICANN Lookup.
• Not paying the amount on a letter or email from a company whose name does not match the registrar in the lookup.

What to ask a web designer before you sign

Plenty of designers and studios register domains for their clients, and some hold them in their own name for a fixed period. That can be a fair part of a service. What matters is that the terms are written down:

For the record, our own term: a domain teialoom registers for a client is held by us until the 24th monthly payment and is the client’s from then, and a domain the client already owns stays registered to them throughout.

One more question belongs on the list, about the site rather than the address. Under US copyright law a website built by an independent contractor generally belongs to the contractor unless the copyright is assigned to you in writing, because websites are not one of the kinds of commissioned work that can be “work made for hire” by agreement. If you want to own the design and code, the contract has to say so.

Getting a domain back from a former web designer

1. Ask in writing. Email the designer asking them either to change the registrant to your business or to transfer the domain into an account you control, and give a date. Keep it polite and specific; most of these are resolved here.
2. If you are the registrant, go to the registrar. If the lookup and any paperwork show your name, the registrar can usually verify your identity and help you take control, even if the account belongs to someone else. Bring proof: invoices, business documents, an email address on the registration.
3. If you cannot get the transfer code, complain. A registrar that does not provide the code within five days of the registrant asking can be reported to ICANN’s Contractual Compliance team through icann.org.
4. If they are the registrant, it is a contract question. Your invoices, emails and any contract are the evidence of what was agreed. A demand letter from an attorney often settles it. If it does not, it is a matter for the courts under your state’s contract law, which is the reason to get the terms in writing before you sign.
5. The dispute policy is a last resort. The UDRP lets a trademark holder recover a domain registered and used in bad faith, but it needs a trademark, and WIPO’s fee for one domain with a single panelist is $1,500. A designer holding a client’s domain after a falling-out is usually a contract dispute, not a UDRP case.

While this is going on, keep the domain from lapsing. If it expires in the middle of a dispute, you may be the only person watching the redemption period, and the person holding it may not renew it. Once it is back, put your own email on it, turn on auto-renew, and check your Google Business Profile is in your account too, since it is the other thing designers often set up in theirs. If your site has a contact form, the new arrangement is also a good moment to check its privacy policy still describes what the site does.