Who Actually Owns Your Domain?

Somebody registered it. Somebody pointed the email at it. Very often that somebody left the company years ago and nobody has signed in since. It works perfectly until the day it has to change, and then it is a locked door with no key.

What we usually find when we look

The domain is registered to one person's personal email address, at a company they no longer work for.
The website, the mailboxes, and the DNS records live with three different providers, and no single list says which.
The renewal is on a card that expired, and the warning notice goes to a mailbox nobody reads.
Moving email to Microsoft 365 needs control of the domain, which is usually the moment all of this gets discovered.

Four things you can check yourself this afternoon

1. Who is the registrant?	Look your domain up on any public whois service. If the contact is a person rather than the company, that is the first thing to put right.
2. When does it renew?	The same lookup gives you the expiry date. Put it in a calendar that belongs to the business rather than to a person.
3. Who can change the DNS?	Ask whoever hosts your website whether they hold the DNS as well. The answer is very often "I assumed you did".
4. Where does the mail actually go?	If nobody can say which provider runs your email without going to look, that is the same problem wearing a different hat.

How this goes

1. We find out who actually holds what

The registrar, the DNS, the mail, and the website. Four things that are often four separate accounts, and we write down where every one of them lives.

2. The business gets put back in control

The domain ends up in an account the company owns, billed to a card the company pays, with more than one person able to get into it.

3. After that the rest is ordinary work

Once you hold your own domain, moving mail or rebuilding a website is a scheduled job rather than an archaeology project.

Sign My Guestbook

Tell us your domain and whatever you know about it. We will look up what is public, tell you what we find, and that is yours whether or not you hire us.

Or telephone 440.210.1362, where a person answers.

My Favorite Links

001996

This counter is a picture of a counter. The real one is in our admin, where it counts real visits and nobody has to take its word for anything.

Now playing: a MIDI file you cannot turn off. We turned it off, because some things belong in 1996.

Best viewed at 800 by 600. It also works on your phone, which is the only promise on this page that 1996 could not have kept.