Who actually holds your domain? Six questions to answer before you change agencies

Why this matters now

The end of the year is when a lot of businesses change web agencies, freelancers or internal developers. Budgets reset, contracts come up, and someone decides the site needs a rebuild. Most of those changes go fine. The ones that don't usually fail in the same place: nobody on the business side can get into the account that holds the domain.

When that happens, everything that hangs off the domain is stuck. You can't point the site somewhere new, you can't fix email, and if the renewal card expires, you can lose the domain altogether. The website is the part everyone thinks about. Email is the part that hurts when it breaks.

Here are six questions to answer before you change anyone. Each has a short answer and a next step.

Questions one and two: whose account, and whose name?

Where is the domain registered, and whose account is it in?

Your domain is registered through a registrar, a company that sells and renews domain names. It sits inside an account at that registrar. The question is whose account.

Often it's the agency's account, or the personal account of a developer who set it up years ago, or the founder's personal email. None of those is wrong in itself, but each means someone outside the business, or one person inside it, controls an important asset.

Next step: ask whoever set up the site which registrar holds the domain and which account it's in. If nobody knows, a public lookup of the domain will usually tell you the registrar, even when the owner's details are hidden. The goal is for the domain to live in an account the company owns, logged into with a shared company address, not one person's inbox.

Whose name is on the domain itself?

The account holder and the registered owner of the domain aren't always the same. The registrar keeps a contact record for the domain, and the name and organization on it matter if there's ever a dispute about who owns it.

Next step: once you can log in, check that the owner contact shows your business name and a company email address that someone reads. If it shows an agency's name, ask them to change it while you're still on good terms. Check the technical and billing contacts on the same screen, since those addresses often receive the important notices too.

Questions three and four: DNS and renewal

Who can change the DNS records?

DNS is the set of records that tells the internet where your website lives, where your email goes and which services are allowed to send mail as you. The DNS might be managed at the registrar, or at a separate provider such as a hosting company or a content delivery service. That's a second login, and it's often the one that gets forgotten.

Next step: find out where the DNS is managed and who has access. Whoever can change DNS can take your site or your email offline in a few minutes, by accident or otherwise. Make sure the business owns that account too, and that the agency has its own user there rather than sharing the owner's login.

Who pays for renewal, and who gets the reminders?

Domains renew every year or every few years. Renewal reminders go to an email address on the account. If that address belongs to someone who has left, or to an agency you stopped working with, nobody sees the warnings. If the renewal card is an old company card or a contractor's personal card, the renewal can fail quietly.

Next step: put a company card on file, turn on automatic renewal and send reminders to a shared address that more than one person reads. This takes five minutes and prevents the most avoidable outage there is. Put the renewal date in a shared calendar as well, a month ahead, in case a card is declined and the warning email goes unread.

Question five: what depends on the domain besides the website?

This is the question people skip. Your domain probably carries much more than the site:

Email. MX records send your mail to your email provider. Change them by mistake and mail stops arriving.

Sender records. SPF and DKIM records tell other mail servers that your email, newsletters and invoices are really from you. Lose them and your messages start landing in spam.

Verifications. Records that prove to Google, Microsoft, payment providers, app stores and marketing tools that you own the domain. Remove them and some of those services stop working or ask you to verify again.

Subdomains. A shop, a help center, a booking page or a staging site might each point somewhere different.

Next step: before anyone moves anything, export or screenshot the full list of DNS records and save it somewhere the business controls. If a migration goes wrong, that list is how you put things back. If you've been through a messy staff departure before, our note on offboarding access covers the same habit for everyday tools.

Question six: what do I actually say to the agency?

Keep it plain and early, ideally before you've told them you're leaving, or at least before the contract ends. An illustrative message:

"Before the end of our current contract, we'd like to make sure the business holds its own accounts. Could you confirm which registrar holds our domain and where our DNS is managed, and help us move both into accounts we own? We'd then add you as a user so you can keep working on the site. Could you also send us a copy of the current DNS records?"

Most agencies will help without fuss. It's a normal request, and good ones would rather not hold your domain anyway. If an agency refuses or stalls, that's worth knowing before you're in a hurry, and your registrar's support team can explain the formal options for proving ownership.

Put this into practice

This week, answer the first four questions and write the answers in one shared document: registrar, account owner, DNS provider, who has access, renewal date and card. Next, save the full DNS record list. Then, and only then, start the conversation about a new site.

If you're planning a rebuild or moving to a new team and want the domain, DNS, email and hosting handled carefully, that's part of our web applications work. Talk to us.

Related work: Sutton Place.