Here's 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 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 fine until the day you need the domain back.
Why the Domain Matters More Than the Website
A website can be rebuilt. It's a few weeks of work and some photographs.
A domain can't. It's your address, it's on your van, it's in every email signature you have ever sent, and it's what every review site and directory listing points at. If somebody else holds it, they hold the one thing about your business you can't 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'll get back the registrar, the dates, and often a privacy service instead of a name. Three things to read:
The registrar. GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, Cloudflare, whoever. If this is a company you have never had an account with, somebody else set it up.
The expiry date. If it's 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 won't 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 isn't.
What to Do if the Domain Isn't Yours
Don't panic and don't 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 authorization 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're who you say you are. That's doable and it is tedious, and the whole thing is avoided by asking now.
While You're 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 afterward ranges from expensive to impossible.
Where the hosting lives. It's a separate question and worth the same five minutes: know who hosts the site, who pays for it, and how to reach them when something breaks.
How We Handle Domains
When a client already owns a domain, it stays in their name, and we host the site and look after it.
If you aren't sure what you have, send us the domain. We'll look it up and tell you what the record says.