Glossary · Technical
Domain registrar.
The company your domain name is registered with. Whoever is listed as the registrant controls the domain, and the domain is the one asset in a website that is genuinely irreplaceable.
Why it matters.
This is the single most common trap in small business web work: the agency registers the domain in its own name, and years later the business cannot move, cannot get email working elsewhere, and has no legal claim to a name customers already know. Register it yourself, in the business's name, with your own billing address, and give the developer access rather than ownership.
How to check it yourself.
Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain and read the registrant. If it is your web designer's company rather than yours, fixing that is the most valuable hour of admin available to you.
Questions
What people ask us.
How do I check domain registrar on my own site?
Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain and read the registrant. If it is your web designer's company rather than yours, fixing that is the most valuable hour of admin available to you.
Two minutes
Where does your
own site land?
Everything above came from opening real websites. Yours takes ten seconds: we load it the way a customer would and say what we find, including when the honest answer is that nothing needs doing.
Think yours needs
rebuilding?
Send us the address and what you do. We will look at what is there and tell you whether a rebuild is worth the money, or whether the problem is somewhere else entirely.