Do You Really Own Your Website? What does it mean to be a Website Owner?

A website is made up of two parts—your actual website (the content files of text, images, etc) and your domain name (the location where it’s displayed on the internet). Think of it like your property; the website is your house. The domain name is the lot it sits on, with a unique address to tell an internet browser such as Internet Explorer where to find the location for your website content.

Say you own your house but you just learned that you don’t actually own the property the house is on. Someone else has the rights to that land but you are the one occupying the space on that land. The person with rights for that land has legal claim to how the land can be used. This is what not owning your domain name is like. If you want to make changes to your website, or even move it to another hosting provider, you won’t be able to if the domain owner is unwilling.

Checking domain name ownership status is quick, easy and free!

Step 1: Visit the official WHOIS domain owner search engine at whois.icann.org and type in your website domain name.

Step 2: Verify that you or your company is the Registrant Contact

That’s it!

The Registrant Contact is the owner of the domain name. It’s not unusual for a website company or host to be listed as the Admin or Tech Contact, where they still have complete access privileges, however it is not necessary that they be the Registrant. And, if they are you may want to ask them to transfer domain registration to you. Any reputable website provider should willingly do that. It should be noted that it’s not unusual for a website company to register one or more of your domain names to their account when setting them up—we do that for our clients—and it’s often done as a convenience during the site building process. But if our clients ask us to transfer the domain to their account, or decide to take their website elsewhere, we gladly do that.