Your marketing agency should not own your domain

Your domain is the name people type to find you. It is also the thing your email runs on, the thing your Google listing links to, and the thing printed on the side of your truck. The website behind it can be rebuilt in a month. The domain cannot be replaced without losing every link, review and business card pointing at it.

That is why the login that controls the domain matters more than the login that controls the website. The registrar account is the deed. The website is the house.

It usually isn't malicious. A web company builds your first site, buys the domain on their own account to make it easy, and bills you for it every year. Years pass. The person who set it up leaves. Now your domain sits inside a company account you have never seen, under an email address you do not control.

Then the relationship ends, or the company closes, or they just stop answering. And you find out the hard way that you can't move your own name.

When we rebuilt the website for Valor Heating & Cooling, the old site lived on Wix and the old web company held the Wix login. The owner had the registrar login for his original .net domain, which is the only reason the move was clean. We launched the new site on a .com he bought himself, then pointed the old .net at it so twenty years of links, cards and van lettering still land on the right page.

One rule came out of that project and it applies to everyone: never let the old domain expire. A redirect only works while you still own the name doing the redirecting. Renewing a spare domain costs about as much as a pizza a year. Losing it costs every backlink the business ever earned.

Registrar. Where the domain is bought and renewed. This is the one that matters most.

DNS. Where the domain is told which server holds the website and which service handles email. Often the same place as the registrar, sometimes not.

Hosting. Where the website files live. Vercel, Squarespace, Wix, a server somewhere.

Email. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 admin. If you lose this one, you lose every password reset that goes to your inbox.

Google Business Profile and your ad accounts. These should be owned by an email on your domain, with the agency added as a manager, never the other way around.

A fair setup is simple. The domain is registered under an account you own, with your card on file and your email on the renewal notices. Your agency gets a manager role or a shared login, and you can remove them in an afternoon. Same for hosting, same for your Google accounts.

That is how we set up every client we work with. If we ever part ways, the website, the domain, the social accounts and the content all stay with the business. It is written into our agreement because an owner should not have to trust us on it.

We have seen a landscaper lose a domain to a designer who moved out of state and stopped checking the renewal inbox. The name expired, a reseller picked it up, and the asking price to get it back was more than the original website cost. The business ended up with a new domain, new cards, and a Google listing pointing at a dead site for months.

We have also seen the quieter version: the agency is still around, still friendly, and still owns the name. Every change takes an email and a wait. The owner wants to switch email providers and can't, because the DNS lives in someone else's account. Nothing is broken, but nothing is theirs either.

Neither owner did anything unusual. They trusted the person who built the site, which is reasonable. The fix is not to trust less. It is to hold the deed yourself and let the people you trust work on the house.

Look up your domain on a WHOIS lookup site. If the registrant is a company you don't recognize, or your old web designer's name, start the transfer conversation now while things are friendly. Ask for the registrar login or an account transfer, not a promise. Put the renewal on a card you control and turn on auto-renew.

If you can't get a straight answer, call us. Untangling domain ownership is a regular part of our website work and we have done it for businesses that had no idea who held their name.