Who actually owns your company's domain name?
Ask a director who owns the company domain and you get the same answer every time, delivered with the mild impatience of someone being asked whether they own their own office furniture. We do, obviously.
Then we look it up, and a reasonable share of the time it turns out they don’t.
I want to be clear that this is not usually anybody’s fault, and it is certainly not stupidity. It is just what happens when a task gets done once, quickly, in 2016, by whoever happened to be setting up the website that week.
Paying for something is not the same as owning it
A domain name has several roles hanging off it, and they get conflated constantly.
The registrant is the legal holder. That is ownership in the only sense that counts. Whoever is named there decides what happens to the name.
Then there is the administrative contact, who gets the correspondence and can often authorise changes, and the technical contact, who manages the configuration. The registrar is just the shop you bought it from. A service provider. Not an owner, whatever the invoice implies.
Here is the uncomfortable part. You can be paying every renewal, using the name every day of your working life, and depending on it for your entire customer relationship, while occupying none of those roles. Payment is not ownership. Use is not ownership. There is exactly one field that matters and most people have never looked at it.
Four ways it goes wrong
Nearly everything I see falls into one of four buckets.
The web agency registered it. They built the site, they needed a domain, they put it under their own account because that was the path of least resistance on a Tuesday afternoon. The relationship ended perfectly amicably three years ago. The name is still theirs.
An employee registered it personally. Often a founder, often someone technical and helpful, using a personal email address and a personal credit card. They have since left, on good terms or otherwise, and nobody can get into the account.
The entity that holds it no longer exists. A sole proprietorship that later incorporated, a predecessor company, a holding structure that got dissolved in a restructuring nobody thought to map against the domain portfolio.
Or nobody knows. There is no record, the renewal invoices arrive from a provider nobody in the building recognises, and the one person who might have known left in 2021.
Why this sits quietly for years and then doesn’t
The thing about a wrong registrant is that it causes no symptoms. The site loads. Mail arrives. The invoice gets paid by standing instruction. Everything works perfectly, right up until it matters.
It matters during due diligence, when a buyer’s lawyer asks for evidence that the company owns its own brand online and you cannot produce it. It matters in a dispute, when a former supplier discovers they are holding something you need and have no obligation to hand over. It matters at renewal, when the notice goes to a mailbox belonging to someone who left, and the name lapses.
That last one deserves a moment. An expired domain does not sit politely waiting for you to notice. There are people who monitor expiring names professionally, and a name attached to a real trading business is worth more to them than to almost anyone else. Getting it back after that point ranges from expensive to impossible, and I have watched businesses discover the difference.
How to check, which takes about five minutes
The registrant of record is published information, subject to privacy redaction, and you can look it up for any domain you like.
What you are checking is short. Does the registrant name match your company’s legal name on ACRA, exactly, not a trading name or an abbreviation or a director’s personal name? Are the contacts on file people who currently work at your company, and is there more than one of them? Do you know which registrar holds it, and can you actually log in?
Three questions. If any answer is “no” or “I’m not sure”, you have found something worth dealing with while it is still boring.
Putting it right
Most of the time this is administrative rather than adversarial, which surprises people who have been quietly dreading it. If the current holder is cooperative, it is a change of registrant details and sometimes a move between registrars. A few days, and nothing goes offline if you sequence it properly.
If the holder is uncooperative, or simply unreachable, it gets harder. The route depends on the extension, the registry’s rules and what evidence of entitlement you can put together. Not hopeless. Just slower, and more expensive, and considerably more stressful than doing it while everyone was still on speaking terms.
Which is the whole argument for looking now.
What we do
Ownership verification is the first thing Securlogic does for a new client, before anything else, because everything downstream is built on it. We establish what is actually registered, who it belongs to, and what state it is in. Where the registrant is wrong, we handle the correction into your company’s name, including the awkward ones involving vendors who are no longer taking your calls.
Names stay registered to your company throughout. We are the technical contact, never the owner. That is the arrangement you should insist on from anyone managing domains on your behalf, and that includes us.
Not sure what your company actually holds?
We will check what is registered against your company, who it is registered to, and what condition it is in. Written in plain English, with no obligation.