Who owns your domain name?

Our web design team are concerned about the number of small businesses who legally don't own their company's domain name. A domain name serves as the address of a website. For example to visit Creative Hub's website you would type "http://www.creativehubuk.com" in your web browser. The creativehubuk.com part of the address is our domain name. Nowadays, a company's domain name is as important as a phone number, it's how people find you on the web to purchase from your store or find out about your services. But unlike your business' phone system, many small business owners don't deal direct with a domain registration company such as 123-Reg.

Most business owners are shocked to learn that they don't legally own their own domain names. After all, they paid to have the website created in the first place, plus pay ongoing fees for web hosting and domain registration. How can they not be the owner if they're paying all the bills? Sometimes, web designers, and we would like to say we find this really unethical, will purchase domain names in their names on their clients behalf. This makes the web design company the legal owners of your company's  domain name. Recently we've had instances of web companies closing and their clients being unable to move their domain name or website because legally they do not own the domain name. The cost of reclaiming the domain can be thousands of pounds and since domain names cost less than £10, their is no reason why business owners should not own and control their domain names.

How do you know for sure that you own your domain name?

if you have a .co.uk address go to http://www.nic.uk/ and in the WHOIS box on the right hand side enter your domain name. You will be taken to a report of your domain name, the registrant is the legal owner of the domain name.

if you have a .com you can use http://www.123-reg.co.uk and type your domain name into their domain checker. In the results click on the taken link and you can see in the registrant section who is the legal owner of the domain name.

If you see the name of someone other than yourself and you are the rightful owner, you need to get this person to transfer ownership of the domain name to you. Until your name shows up in this search, it is possible that whoever owns the name could take your website offline, or even sell the domain to a competitor. 

Creative Hub Policy

We will help customers to setup an account with a registration company, we personally use and recommend 123 Reg. Once the account is setup the business owner can use the easy step by step process to  register and pay for their domain name. The domain is then theirs and completely under their control.

If we absolutely have to register the domain name on a company's behalf, we always register the domain name in the company's name. Once everything is setup we will then transfer the domain into the company's own 123 Reg account, giving them complete control.