Here is a question worth answering before you need the answer: if you fell out with whoever built your website tomorrow, could you take your domain with you?
For a lot of small businesses the honest answer is that nobody knows. The domain was registered by a web designer eleven years ago, on their account, with their card, and the renewal has been quietly happening ever since. That arrangement works perfectly right up until the moment it does not.
Why it matters more than the website itself
A website can be rebuilt. It is a few weeks of work and some photographs.
A domain cannot. It is your address, it is on your van, it is in every email signature you have ever sent, and it is what every review site and directory listing points at. If somebody else holds it, they hold the one thing about your business you cannot replace by working harder.
The same goes for the email that runs on it. Losing yourname@yourbusiness.com
means losing password resets on every account tied to it, which is a very bad
afternoon.
How to find out in five minutes
Go to lookup.icann.org and type your domain in. You will get back the registrar, the dates, and often a privacy service instead of a name. Three things to read:
The registrar. GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, Cloudflare, whoever. If this is a company you have never had an account with, somebody else set it up.
The expiry date. If it is under a year away and nobody has told you about it, find out who gets that renewal notice.
Whether the record is private. Most modern registrations hide the owner behind a privacy service, which is fine and normal. It also means the lookup will not tell you who controls it, so you have to check the other way.
The other way is the useful one: try to log in. Go to that registrar's site and run a password reset against your own email address. If you get a reset link, the account is yours. If you get nothing, it is not.
What to do if it is not yours
Do not panic and do not make it a fight. In the overwhelming majority of cases this happened by convenience rather than by design, and the person holding it will hand it over without a fuss.
Ask for one of two things. Either they move the domain into an account in your name, or they give you the authorisation code so you can transfer it yourself. Both are routine and both take a few days because of a transfer lock the registrars enforce.
Where it goes wrong is when nobody asks for years, the person who registered it retires or stops answering email, and the recovery process becomes a matter of proving to a registrar that you are who you say you are. That is doable and it is tedious, and the whole thing is avoided by asking now.
While you are in there
Two more things worth checking in the same sitting.
Auto-renew. Turn it on. A domain that lapses can be picked up by anybody, and a small number of people watch for exactly that. Getting it back afterwards ranges from expensive to impossible.
Where the hosting lives. Separate question, same principle. Knowing whether your site sits on a server somebody else pays for is worth five minutes of finding out.
Our position on this
Every domain and hosting account we set up goes in the client's name, not ours, and you can take it elsewhere whenever you want without asking us. We think that should be the default and we are aware it often is not.
If you are not sure what you have, send us the domain. We will look it up and tell you what the record says, whether or not there is any work in it for us.