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Who owns your website domain?
The domain belongs to whoever is listed as the registrant on the registrar account, which is not always the business paying for it. If an agency registered it on the client's behalf under the agency's own account, the agency controls it, and that control is what makes a bad separation expensive.
How to check in five minutes
Log into the registrar directly, not through anybody's dashboard, and confirm the account is in the business's name with an email address the business controls. If nobody knows the registrar, a public WHOIS lookup will name it, though the registrant details themselves are often masked by privacy protection.
Why it outranks the site
A website can be rebuilt. A domain cannot be recreated, and every email address, every printed card, every review link, and every backlink earned over a decade depends on it. Losing access to the domain is the one failure in this whole category that a business cannot work around.
Fixing it without a fight
The clean move is a registrar transfer while the relationship is still good. It takes an authorisation code from the current registrar and usually a few days to complete. Doing it during a dispute is possible but slow, and depends on proving a claim to a name registered in someone else's account.
Set the renewal to automatic
More small businesses lose a domain to an expired credit card than to a bad agency. Auto-renew on, contact email pointed somewhere a human reads, and a calendar reminder a month before expiry.
Start with the free audit.
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