Who should own your domain name?

Your domain name should be registered to you, in an account you control, and checking takes about a minute — the walkthrough is below. We are Freedom35 Web Design: we build custom websites free and clients keep them on an annual plan from $180 a year. Every client of ours buys their own domain, in their own name, direct from the registrar — about $12–15 a year. That is our published policy, not a courtesy, and this page explains why it should be everyone's.

How do I check who owns my domain? The 60-second version

Step 1: look it up. Go to ICANN's official lookup tool at lookup.icann.org and type in your domain. This is the registry's own record — the same data the old "WHOIS" services showed. Two fields matter:

• Registrar — the company the domain was bought from: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and so on. Note which one it is.
• Registrant — the owner. Since privacy law changed in 2018, this usually reads "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY" or shows a proxy company. That is normal and not a red flag by itself. But if it does show a name and the name is your web designer's business, you have your answer, and it is the wrong one.

Step 2: the real test. Because the public record is usually redacted, the decisive question is simpler: can you log into the account at that registrar? Do you have the username and password? Is the account under your email address, with your card paying the renewal? If yes to all three, you own your domain in every way that matters.

Step 3: check the expiry date while you are in the lookup. A domain that lapses gets sold to whoever wants it, and getting it back ranges from expensive to impossible. Renewal should be on auto-pay, on your card.

If you failed step 2 — no login, someone else's email, someone else's card — keep reading.

How do designers end up owning client domains?

Mostly not through villainy. A client says "can you just handle all that?", the designer registers the domain under the agency account in thirty seconds, and everyone moves on. It is genuinely more convenient — for the designer. Years later the domain sits in an account the client has never seen, at a registrar they could not name.

Sometimes it is less innocent. Some shops register client domains under their own name deliberately, or bundle "domain included" into a monthly fee, because a client who cannot take their address with them is a client who cannot leave. The renewal gets marked up, the exit gets complicated, and the relationship quietly stops being one you chose to stay in.

Either way the result is the same: the thing your business cards, your email, and your customers' bookmarks all point at is legally someone else's property.

Why does it matter, concretely?

• You can't leave cleanly. Fire the designer and your website, and every email address on that domain, can go dark until they cooperate.
• You depend on their diligence. If they forget the renewal, retire, or go out of business, your domain expires with theirs. Recovering an expired domain is a bad week at best.
• You pay their markup. A $12 renewal resold inside a "domain included" plan costs whatever they say it costs.
• You negotiate from weakness. Every future disagreement — pricing, quality, response times — happens with them holding your address.

What if my web designer already owns it?

Fix it now, while the relationship is fine. Not during a dispute — that is the worst possible time to discover who holds what.

• Ask plainly. "I'd like the domain registered in my own name — can we transfer it to an account I control?" A decent designer says yes without friction. Resistance tells you something worth knowing.
• Open your own registrar account first, under your email, with your card.
• Ask for the transfer. Either they move the domain into your account at the same registrar (fast, usually free), or they unlock it and give you the transfer authorization code for a transfer to a different registrar.
• Expect a wait in one case: registrars commonly apply a 60-day transfer lock after a registration or an ownership change. Annoying, standard, survivable — plan the handover, don't panic about it.
• Do not cancel anything until the domain is in your account. Payment first is fine; leverage evaporates the day after.

If they refuse outright, escalate politely and in writing, and if you paid for the registration, say so — paper trails settle most of these. The lesson for the next website: ownership is a question you ask before anyone builds anything.

What about the website itself — who owns that?

The domain is the clean-cut case: one registration, one name on it, and it should be yours. The website is messier, because "the website" is really three things that can each belong to someone different:

• The domain — your address. Covered above. Yours, always.
• The content — your words, your photos, your customer data. Morally yours in every arrangement; contractually yours only if the contract says so. Ask before signing, not after.
• The code and the hosting — the machinery that serves the pages. This is the part that legitimately varies. Under a build-and-hand-over contract you own the files; under a subscription model, ours included, the designer runs the machinery and you pay while you use it.

The test that separates a fair subscription from a hostage arrangement is what happens when you stop paying. With us: the site comes offline at the end of your paid term, you keep your domain, and on request you get a zip of your content and any customer data the site collected, in open formats, within 10 business days. You lose the machinery you were renting and keep everything that was ever really yours. If a provider cannot give you that sentence about their own model, that is worth knowing before you sign.

Our policy, verbatim

From our pricing page, where it sits in the list of things your plan does not include:

We host your site, we maintain it, and if you ever stop paying, the site comes offline — but the domain was never ours to keep. You walk away with your address and a zip of your content. A designer who is confident you'll stay doesn't need to hold your keys, and the free-build-first model on how it works only makes sense because leaving is genuinely easy. It is the same reason the build takes seven days and not seven weeks: the whole arrangement is designed so you stay because it's good, not because it's locked.

The one-minute ownership audit

• Look your domain up at lookup.icann.org
• Note the registrar and the expiry date
• Confirm you can log into the registrar account
• Confirm the account email is yours and renewal is on your card
• If any of those fail, start the transfer conversation this week