Your name on the internet, registered in your name.

The holder decides, and the holder is you

A domain is not bought: it is registered in someone’s name for a period of time, and that someone — the holder — is who decides where it points, who administers it and which provider it moves to. That is why the first thing we do when a site starts is register the domain with your business details, not ours. We appear as the technical contact, which is whoever does the work; you appear as the holder, which is whoever decides.

The difference reads like paperwork right up until the day you want to change provider. Then it is the only difference that matters. ICANN, the body that coordinates the domain name system, publishes the rights that come with being the holder, and moving to another registrar is one of them.

• The registration contract is in your company’s name, with its tax number and address.
• You decide where the domain points and who administers it.
• Transferring it is a right of yours, not a favour we grant.

Renewing on time is not a detail

The day a domain expires, the website and the email stop working at the same moment, and the usual way to find out is a customer telling you. For generic domains — .com, .net, .org — ICANN obliges registrars to send notices before and after expiry and sets a recovery window, but recovering a lapsed domain is expensive, slow and does not always end well. So renewal runs automatically and with advance warning: remembering costs far less than fixing.

An email address that is not the one from home

Writing from a free address with your business name tacked on is the quickest way to look improvised, and in some trades it rules you out on the spot. With your own domain the address ends in yourbusiness.com and that is that.

Whether that email lands in the inbox or in the spam folder depends on three marks published on the domain, which Gmail, Outlook and the rest check before deciding: one says which servers may send on your behalf, another signs each message so tampering shows, and the third says what to do with anything that does not add up. They are three open standards — SPF, DKIM and DMARC — and we set them up the day the site goes live, not the day somebody complains their emails never arrive.

What if I already have a domain?

We keep it, because it is yours and it already has a history. We transfer it and point it at the new site, sorting out the email first so there is no window in which messages go missing. If the domain sits in someone else’s name — a previous agency, a helpful acquaintance — the first step is not technical: it is getting ownership back. Who is listed as holder and as registrar can be looked up, and from there it is clear what to ask for and from whom.