OurDomain

Domain names, explained for the people who share one

Section

Who holds a domain, and how it moves

Ownership of a domain is decided by one field in one register. This section covers what goes in that field and how a name passes from one holder to the next.

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The word ownership is used loosely around domain names, and the looseness causes most of the trouble. A person who pays the renewal every year feels like the owner. A volunteer who built the website and knows every password feels like the owner. A charity whose name is on the letterhead feels like the owner. Only one of them is recorded as the registrant, and when a provider is asked to make a change, the registrant is the party it listens to. Everyone else is, in the registrar's eyes, a third party with an opinion.

That is not unreasonable. A registrar has no way to judge a committee minute or a friendly arrangement made in a pub in 2014. It has a record, and the record is the whole of what it knows. The practical consequence for an organisation is that the record has to be correct while relations are good, because correcting it afterwards depends on the goodwill of whoever is named in it. A neighbourhood association that discovers, during an argument, that its domain is registered to a former secretary has very few levers left to pull.

The pages here work through that in sequence. They separate the registrant of record from the payer and the builder, explain what belongs in the registrant contact when the organisation has no legal form of its own, and describe what is publicly visible now that most personal details are withheld from public lookups. They then cover the two moves that are often confused with each other: changing who is recorded as the holder, and moving the name to a different provider. Each has its own waiting periods, and doing them in the wrong order can lock a name for weeks.

Two practical chapters follow. One is the handover, which is the moment a committee actually loses names, and which goes better when the outgoing volunteer is asked for a written record rather than a verbal reassurance. The other is email, which breaks earlier and more visibly than a website does, and which is worth checking before a move rather than after. For a group planning any of this, the material on shared control is the natural companion.

In this section

  1. Who owns a domain nameThree people can each reasonably feel they own an organisation's domain. A registrar recognises only the one written in the record.
  2. What to put in the registrant contactThe registrant field is the closest thing a domain has to a deed. Filling it in carefully takes a few minutes and saves years of difficulty.
  3. WHOIS, RDAP and what is still publicLooking up a domain used to reveal the holder's name and address. It no longer does, but a lookup still answers most of the useful questions.
  4. Transferring a domain to somebody elseTwo different moves are both called a transfer. Confusing them, or doing them in the wrong order, can lock a name for weeks.
  5. Handing a domain to the next committeeDomains are rarely lost in a dramatic way. They are lost in the gap between one volunteer leaving and the next one working out what existed.
  6. Keeping email working when a domain movesA website that goes down is noticed. Email that goes down is worse, because messages are refused and nobody sees what was missed.
  7. Moving an organisation to a new domainChanging a domain is not a switch but an overlap. The old name stays useful long after the new one is in place.