My web designer has my domain and I can’t get it back

Before anything else on this site: type your web address into a WHOIS lookup and see whose name is on it. This is the most common complaint from small business owners in eleven years of forum posts, and almost nobody knows it applies to them until it does.

“We paid our designer to create our website, as well as domain and hosting server. Now we realise this was a bad idea as he has complete control over our ability to make the website live… I only have access to my WordPress account (non-administrative). Nor do I have access to my domain name.”

UK Business Forums, in a thread titled “Web Designer holding website hostage”

It is not one unlucky business. There are at least four separate threads on that one forum saying the same thing, spread across a decade. A developer replying to one of them put it plainly: “I come across this issue several times a year.”

Why it matters more than it sounds

The domain is not a technicality. It is the thing everything else hangs off.

Your email dies with itIf your address is [email protected], that email exists because you control the domain. Lose it and every email address on it stops working the same day.

You cannot moveYou cannot change to a different developer, host or provider without giving up your web address — the one on your van, your cards, your leaflets and every listing you have ever made.

Your site can be switched offOne owner described their site being down for a month, with no idea who to ask: “I have contacted the domain people, they said to contact the server provider, which I have done, but they said they have contacted the person who built the website.”

It can lapse without you knowingRenewal notices go to whoever is registered. If that is not you, you find out when it stops working — and once a domain drops, anyone can buy it.

It is not always a rogue developer

Sometimes it is a large company doing it as policy. A business owner on the same forum, about a well-known directory:

“They registered the domain in their own name at their own address, so I guess they legally own it. They never said that was the case to the poor business who can’t switch provider.”

UK Business Forums

And a registrar customer who lost a domain the business had held for a quarter of a century, after being locked out of the account:

“One of these domains had been associated with us for around 25 years. It was not abandoned. It was not unwanted. It was part of our business identity.”

A one-star review of a UK domain registrar

How to check, in two minutes, for nothing

Do this now

Search for WHOIS lookup — or for a .uk address, use Nominet’s own lookup, since Nominet run every .uk domain. Type in your web address.

Look for the registrant. That is the legal owner. Not the admin contact, not the technical contact, not whoever pays the bill. The registrant.

If that is your name or your business name, you are fine and you can stop reading. If it is somebody else’s, that is worth sorting out while everyone is still on good terms.

The forum’s standing advice on this is worth repeating: if you are the registrant, you hold the cards. You can move the domain wherever you like and nobody can stop you. If you are not, the conversation is a negotiation rather than an instruction — which is exactly why it is better had early.

What we check

Who the domain is registered toAnd when it expires, and whether it is locked against being moved.

Who your email actually runs throughOften a different company from the website, and often the thing nobody thought about.

Whether losing your developer would take the site with itWhere it is hosted and whether anything would survive.

We tell you what we find. If your name is on everything, we say so and there is nothing to do. That is the outcome we would rather report.

Check my website

Or ring and ask: 020 3422 3453

InSite Scan › Who owns my domain?