It’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough – just who does actually ‘own’ your domain name? The reason it’s seldom asked is that most of the time it doesn’t cause any problems – either you built your own website, in which case you probably registered the domain yourself, or you paid someone to do it, and they registered it for you – but what happens if something goes wrong, and how can you ensure you retain access to your domain?
The first thing to note is that domains aren’t ever really ‘owned’, but they are ‘registered’, and that’s the key piece of information. Ultimately, whoever the domain is registered to has full rights to that domain, and no-one can take it from the registrant without their permission (with a few exceptions relating to crime/bankruptcy). What makes things difficult is that a domain can, in theory, be registered to ‘person A’, paid for by ‘Person B’, held in the account of ‘person C’, be controlled by the nameservers of ‘person D’, and pointed to the website of ‘person E’. That’s five different entities involved in the process, and only one of them ultimately has the rights to the domain. Let’s break down these stages so you can understand the process better.
Registration
As pointed out above, this is the really important stage. Whenever a domain is purchased, the contact details of the registrant are entered as part of the registration process. The details include the name, address and, arguably most importantly, the email address. I say ‘arguably’, as the name is probably the most important theoretically, as this is used to identify the owner in the event of a dispute, but in practical terms, the email address can be used automatically verify ownership and bypass the any disputes with the registering bodies (ICANN/Nominet). In any case, having the details of the registrant correct and up to date is absolutely vital, so if you ever use a third-party to buy or manage a domain (i.e. an agency or freelancer), make sure you ask them to confirm who the registrant of your domain is.
Purchase
This one can be confusing legally, as in theory you could buy a domain and pay to renew it for 20 years, but if you registered it in someone else’s name, they technically have the rights to it. Now, there are situations in which whoever paid for it may ultimately be granted access to it in the event of a dispute – if you ask an agency to register a domain for you but you never actually pay them for it, they would be within their rights to hold it back from you until payment has been received. However, even under those circumstances, if they have registered the domain to you there are ways you can take it away from them without them even knowing – if you buy a .co.uk/.uk domain, you can log in to the Nominet website, enter your email address and any domains registered to you will be available for your to manage – including the ability to change the domain’s TAG and transfer it to a different provider.
Domain Hosting
It can be odd to think of a domain as needing hosting, as typically it’s the website itself that needs a host server, and the domain just sits in a website portal somewhere and is pointed to the host server. However, the domain itself is still held within a hosting environment of sorts, and that’s what the ‘domain host’ or ‘domain provider’ is. This doesn’t normally cost anything like as much money as a proper web server hosting package, and typically the costs are around £10 / £15 per year for standard domains. Examples of a domain hosting provider would be GoDaddy, 20i, Heart Internet, Namesco etc. Each of these providers has their own domain ‘TAG’, and when a domain is registered, the TAG is set to whichever provider will be hosting the domain for you. For example, 20i’s TAG is EXTEND. If I want to host my domain with 20i, I just set the TAG to EXTEND and ask 20i to migrate it into my account. However, just because it’s in my account doesn’t mean I am the registrant, so be careful to check this for any domains you think you own.
Nameservers
A step down from the TAG are the ‘nameservers’ of a domain. In addition to having their own TAG, domain providers usually have their own nameservers, and these are used to host the ‘DNS records’ of a domain. Without going into too much detail, the nameservers are effectively the broad level controls of where a domain is pointed to, whereas the DNS records are the detailed control on a level below this. Most of the time, if you want full control of where your domain is pointed (i.e. which web/email host servers) to, then you will want to keep the nameservers set to whichever company you have an account with. This enables you to control every aspect of that domain’s usage, such a which email provider it works with, and which host/server the website itself is held on.
DNS Records
As mentioned above, the DNS records are used to ‘point’ a domain to a particular server. Each service (e.g. email, website) has its own DNS record or set of DNS records, and changing these allows you to control where that service is set. They normally take the form of an ‘A’ record, ‘CNAME’ record or ‘TXT’ record, though there are quite a few others too. Each record has an address (either a web address or an IP address), and your email/web hosting provider will provide a list of DNS records for you to use in order for their service to become active. It’s a job best left for experts, as if you make a mistake your entire website/email service can stop working, but once set you rarely need to change any of these until you come to change your web/email hosts further down the line.
Website Hosting
Even after all that, there’s still sometimes confusion between hosting a domain and hosting a website on that domain. You may well end up in a situation where someone else hosts your website for you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have any control over the domain or where it’s pointing to. This can often be a problem when you have been with a provider for several years, and can’t remember the detail of how the website was set live in the first place – there are normally three situations:
- You control the domain via the nameservers, and you pointed the relevant DNS records to the web server yourself.
- You host the domain in your own account but you set the nameservers to those of a third-party provider and they set the DNS records to point to the web server.
- Someone else registered and hosts the domain for you (perhaps a previous provider) and they pointed either the nameservers or the DNS records at the new web server.
In the event of any confusion, you may need to go back through some old emails to find out what you did at the time. Fortunately, there are various lookup services that you can use to find out when a domain was registered/updated, which provider’s TAG/nameservers it’s using, and even what server the various services are hosted on – it’s best to ask an expert to do this for you, as they can typically dig into more detailed lookups, but you can also get some top level information just by entering the domain in a website such as https://who.is/.
Ultimately, what seems like a simple question of ‘who owns my domain’ can become a real journey down a rabbit hole, but if you plan things correctly and ask the right questions there’s nothing to worry about – just make sure you keep notes on whatever you or anyone does on your behalf for future reference.