Eight things to verify about your domain today
The domain is the one asset that makes every other asset reachable. It is also the one most often registered by whoever happened to be building the site that month.
Confirm that the domain is registered to your company, that somebody inside it can log into the registrar, and that renewal does not depend on one person's card and inbox. Everything else on this list is recoverable in a day; those three are not.
Verify these now, while nothing is wrong
Each of these takes minutes and none require a technical person. The value is entirely in doing them before the day you need them.
- The registrant is your company, not an agency, employee or founder personally
- Somebody currently employed can log into the registrar account
- The contact address is a company address that more than one person reads
- Auto renewal is on, and the card behind it has not expired
- The domain is locked against transfer
- The DNS records are documented, including mail
- Two-factor authentication is enabled on the registrar account
- Any additional domains you own are on the same account, not scattered
Why the contact address matters more than it looks
Registrar notices go to the registrant address: renewal warnings, transfer approvals, verification requests that suspend the domain if ignored. If that address is a former employee's mailbox, every one of those messages goes somewhere nobody reads.
It is also the address an attacker would target to move a domain. A shared company mailbox with two-factor authentication is a cheap fix for both problems.
Keep DNS separate from hosting in your head
Where the domain points is not where the site lives, and the two are often managed in different places. When a site is moved, the risk is rarely the site: it is a mail record left behind, so email quietly stops arriving for a day.
Write the records down before any migration, mail included, and compare them afterwards. It is a five minute habit that prevents the most common migration incident.
If it is already in somebody else's name
Ask for a transfer rather than for access. A transfer moves the registration to your account and takes days at most, whereas shared access leaves the ownership question unanswered until the relationship ends badly.
Do it while the relationship is good. A domain held by a supplier is only a problem on the day it becomes a serious one.
What to take from this
- 01Registrant, login and renewal are the three that are not recoverable
- 02The registrar contact must be a company address more than one person reads
- 03Document DNS, especially mail records, before any migration
- 04Ask for a transfer, not for shared access
Ask the question directly
- Our agency registered it and we are on good terms. Is that fine?
- It is fine until it is not, and the fix costs nothing today. A transfer while everybody is comfortable is a formality; the same request during a dispute is leverage.
- Should the domain and the hosting be with the same company?
- Not necessarily, and separating them limits how much a single account compromise can reach. What matters is that you control both accounts.
- How long does a domain transfer take?
- Usually a few days, with a lock period afterwards on many extensions. Local extensions have their own rules, so check before assuming it can be done during a launch week.
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