Home / Who owns your website
Most business owners assume they do. A surprising number find out otherwise at the worst possible moment.
You own your website only if the domain is registered in your name, the hosting account is yours, and you hold the logins. If your developer registered the domain on their account — which is extremely common for small business websites in India — then legally and practically they control the address your customers use to find you. This page shows you how to check in about five minutes, and what to do if the answer is not what you expected.
People think of a website as one thing. It is really four, and they can each sit in different hands.
This takes about two minutes and needs nothing from your developer.
The test is not whether your developer is trustworthy. It is what happens if they change business, fall ill, or simply stop replying. Good people become unreachable for ordinary reasons, and the domain does not care why.
Do not treat this as a confrontation. In most cases it was convenience rather than strategy — the developer registered everything on one account because it was faster at the time. Ask plainly:
You have more options than it feels like. If the domain is registered to your business name, you can approach the registrar directly with proof of identity. If it is registered to them, you generally cannot force a transfer, but you can register a close variant, rebuild, and redirect your marketing to the new address — painful, but survivable, and far better than waiting indefinitely. Start the rebuild in parallel rather than after; the waiting is what costs you.
Before any other work starts, everything is moved into your name and your accounts — domain, hosting, Google, analytics, code. If you stop working with us, you keep all of it and we hand over passwords the same week. We put it in the contract rather than leaving it to goodwill, because goodwill is exactly what fails in the situations this page describes.
A real audit of a real business site, what was wrong, what it was costing, and exactly what we would change. No pitch, no roundups, one email a week.
Businesses are anonymised. Unsubscribe in one click. We never pass your address to anyone.
The free audit includes a domain and ownership check. You will know exactly what you control, whoever ends up doing the work.
Search your domain at lookup.icann.org and read the Registrant details. If the name and email shown are not yours, you do not control the domain. If privacy protection is enabled the details are hidden, in which case ask your developer directly for the registrar login rather than a screenshot.
First establish what is actually in your name using an ICANN lookup. If the domain is registered to your business you can approach the registrar directly with proof of identity. If it is registered to the developer, start a parallel rebuild on a domain you control rather than waiting — the waiting is usually the expensive part.
It is the authorisation key needed to move a domain between registrars. The current registrar must unlock the domain and issue it, and the receiving registrar uses it to complete the transfer. Without it a transfer cannot proceed.
Domains registered or transferred within the previous sixty days are normally locked against transfer under ICANN rules. It is a standard anti-fraud measure rather than anything your registrar is choosing to do.
Usually, yes. Google has a process to request ownership of a listing you can prove is your business, though it is slower than a domain transfer and often requires verification. Starting it early is worth it.