Who owns your website and its domain, and how to check

A website is three separate holdings, and each can sit with a different party.

• The domain name. A registrar holds the registration on behalf of a registrant, and whoever is named as registrant controls it.
• The hosting. The account where the site runs belongs to whoever opened it and pays for it.
• The site itself. Who owns the design, the text, the images and the code is a matter for the contract with whoever made them.

ICANN, the body that coordinates domain names, runs a free tool at lookup.icann.org for looking up what it calls “publicly available registration data”. Enter the domain. The result names the registrar, gives the dates of registration and expiry, and lists the name servers.

For a name ending in .uk, the registry is Nominet, and its WHOIS service shows the registration date, the registrar and the name servers. Nominet no longer displays a registrant’s name or address by default.

Where the registrant’s details are hidden, the test is practical: whoever can log in to the account at the registrar controls the domain.

The name servers in the lookup usually name the company that handles the domain’s DNS, which is often the host or the website platform. The invoices settle it: find who is paid for hosting each month or year.

Four things belong in the business’s own name.

• The registrar account, with the business as registrant and an address the business reads as the contact.
• The hosting or platform account, with the designer added as a user.
• An administrator login to the website.
• Ownership of the Google accounts. Our guide to sharing Search Console and Analytics access shows how owners and users differ.

Ask in writing for one of two things: a change of registrant to the business, or a transfer to an account the business controls. Most designers register a client’s domain for convenience and will hand it over.

Mind the order. Registrars commonly lock a domain for 60 days after the registrant’s details change, so a change of registrant can delay a transfer. Our guides to transferring a domain from Wix and from Squarespace set out those locks.

If the request is refused, the evidence is the contract and the invoices showing who paid for the registration. For a .uk name, Nominet has a Dispute Resolution Service, open to a complainant with rights in the name, such as a trade mark.

The lookup also shows when the registration expires. A domain that lapses takes the website and the email down with it. Set the registration to renew automatically, on a card that is in date, with renewal notices going to an address someone reads.