Four separate building blocks
A website feels like a single thing, but technically it’s made of several independent services. Each can come from a different provider, and each can be moved on its own.
- The domain is the address, e.g.
yourcompany.com. You don’t buy it outright: you pay for the right to use it for a set period (usually a year) and renew it. You manage it through a registrar, the company whose panel you log in to. - DNS is the domain’s address book. It tells browsers which server hosts the website and tells mail servers where to deliver email. It’s usually set in the registrar’s panel or with a provider such as Cloudflare.
- Hosting is the server that stores the website’s files and database. You can change it without changing the domain: just point DNS at the new server.
- Email (
name@yourcompany.com) doesn’t have to live with the same provider as the website. It’s often better if it doesn’t, so a website outage or migration never cuts off your business email.
In short: the domain is the address, DNS is the signpost, hosting is the building, and email is the mailbox. You can move to a new building and keep the same address.
Why the domain must belong to you
Every domain is registered to a specific person or company, called the registrant. The registrant decides what happens to it: renewing it, moving it to another registrar, or letting it expire.
It’s very common for a business domain to have been registered by a web developer, an employee or a friend, “just to get it done quickly”. Nobody notices while things go well. The problem shows up when you change developers, part ways with an employee, or the company that held the domain goes out of business. Getting your own address back can then take weeks, cost a lot of stress, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all.
So the rule is simple: your company should be the registrant, and the registrar account should be yours. Your developer can be given access, but shouldn’t be the owner.
How to check who owns your domain
- WHOIS / RDAP lookup. Your domain registry or registrar provides a lookup tool. It shows the registrar and key dates, and for companies often the registrant too. Private individuals’ details are usually hidden.
- The registrar panel. If you have a login, check the registrant details and the contact email. If you don’t have one, that’s the first sign the domain may not be under your control.
- Invoices. Who pays the renewal every year? If the invoice isn’t addressed to your company, it’s worth asking why.
If someone else turns out to be the registrant, talk to them and ask for the domain to be transferred to you. Ideally, do it right away, while the relationship is good.
Renewal and expiry
A domain nobody renews eventually goes back into the pool, and anyone can register it, including people hoping to resell it or capture its traffic. To avoid that:
- turn on auto-renewal in the registrar’s panel,
- make sure the contact email works and someone reads it. Renewal reminders go there,
- don’t use a contact email on the same domain. If the domain expires, that inbox stops working too,
- if you pay by card, keep an eye on its expiry date.
How to choose hosting
The cheapest hosting is rarely the best choice for a business website. Instead of the first-year price, compare:
- the renewal price, often several times higher than the promotional one,
- up-to-date software (e.g. PHP for WordPress) and the ability to switch versions,
- backups: how often they run, how long they’re kept and whether you can download them yourself,
- server location: close to your customers and compliant with data protection law,
- technical support: whether a human answers, and how fast,
- resources: for an online store or a larger website, cheap shared hosting quickly becomes a bottleneck.
For more on backups, see the guide to website backups.
Access: a little order saves a lot of stress
Logins scattered across emails and sticky notes are asking for trouble. A few habits are enough:
- keep credentials in a password manager, not a spreadsheet or notes,
- turn on two-factor authentication at the registrar, the host and in the website’s admin,
- give your developer a separate account (or delegated access), not your password. When you stop working together, just remove it,
- write down where everything is: registrar, DNS, hosting, email. One page of notes makes life much easier when something breaks.
Checklist
- My company is the domain registrant, not the developer or an employee.
- I have my own registrar login with two-factor authentication.
- The domain renews automatically and the contact email is current and not on the same domain.
- I know where DNS, hosting and email are, and I have access to them.
- The host makes backups and I know how to download them.
- My developer has their own accounts that I can remove at any time.
