Somewhere in Clark County right now, two restaurants' old web addresses are making money for strangers. The domains lapsed, somebody else scooped them up, and now the address customers remember — the one on old menus and business cards — serves a page of ads. I found both while checking how this county's restaurants show up online, and it's the quietest way I know for a business to lose something it thinks it owns.
How it happens
Almost never through anything dramatic. A domain gets registered by whoever was helping at the time — a designer, a nephew, an employee who's since moved on — under their account, on their card. Years pass. The card expires, the email goes unread, the renewal fails, and the domain quietly goes back on the open market. Nobody did anything wrong on purpose. The business just never actually held the deed.
I watched a local organization discover this very thing this year: their domain turned out to live in the personal account of somebody who'd once helped them out — which meant they were one missed renewal away from losing their web address, their site, and the email addresses attached to it, all at once. They found out because somebody finally looked.
Check yours in two minutes
- Go to lookup.icann.org — the official registry lookup — and type your domain.
- Look at the expiry date. If it's inside the next few months and you didn't know that, keep reading.
- Ask yourself three questions: whose account is the domain in, whose email gets the renewal notices, and whose card pays them? If any answer is "not mine" or "no idea," that's the whole finding.
What good looks like
The domain registered in your name, in an account you can log into, with renewal notices going to an email you actually read, auto-renew turned on, and the expiry date written on a calendar anyway — because auto-renew fails exactly as often as cards expire. If somebody else set yours up and it's not like that, moving it into your name is a normal, routine transfer, and any honest person who registered it for you will help you do it.
Where I stand on this
Every domain I set up is registered in the client's name, in the client's account — same as their hosting. Not because I'm a saint, but because I think you should be able to fire me and keep everything, and I'd rather win the renewal on the work. If the person who runs your website goes quiet when you ask "can I have the keys?" — that's an answer too.
Two minutes. lookup.icann.org, your domain, the expiry date. If what you find confuses you, text it to me and I'll tell you what you're looking at, free.