Website · Domain ownership
Who owns your practice’s domain—and can you access it?
Your practice name is on the website. Check whose account controls the domain, renewal, and recovery before you need an urgent change.
Your practice name is on the website. Whose account controls the address?
A designer registered the domain when you opened. The site works and the bill gets paid. Years later, you want a new website—and nobody knows which account can approve the change.
That is an expensive time to search old emails. Check domain access while the website and inbox are still working.
Confirm the practice can manage and recover the account.
The domain is the address people type to find you. A registrar manages its registration. DNS provides the directions connecting it to your website and email; another company may manage those.
Record which accounts handle registration, renewal, DNS, hosting, and email. Confirm authorized practice access and working recovery. Know who can help with each part before a renewal notice makes it urgent.
An outside lookup tells only part of the story.
Public records can often identify the registrar and website or email destinations. They do not reliably prove who pays or can recover the account. Privacy settings may hide registration details.
Use the lookup as a list of accounts to confirm. Check administrators, registration, billing, renewal, and recovery inside the authorized account.
Make the handover work before removing anyone.
Ask the current provider for the account map and handover process. Confirm practice access before changing the provider’s role. Otherwise you could lose the person able to fix a missing setting.
Keep the resulting document somewhere the practice controls. Record responsibilities and recovery arrangements, but do not circulate passwords in a spreadsheet or inquiry form. Make the next change easier.
Your next steps
- 1
Read public records
Identify visible registration and routing information. Mark hidden or uncertain details as unverified.
- 2
Confirm account control
Check the legal registrant, billing, administrators, and recovery contacts from inside the relevant accounts.
- 3
Map the dependencies
Record which settings support the website, email, booking subdomains, and other services.
- 4
Agree on any changes
Document approved ownership or access updates, verification steps, and recovery options before changing records.
What an outside review can and cannot tell you
| Question | Public review | Account check |
|---|---|---|
| Who is the registrar? | Often visible | Confirm the account |
| Where does email route? | Public mail records | Confirm actual subscription |
| Who pays renewal? | Not reliably visible | Billing owner |
| Who can recover access? | Not visible | Recovery and administrator settings |
Example evidence checklist. An outside audit should distinguish observations from ownership that still needs confirmation.
Before you decide
What do registrar and DNS mean?
The registrar is the company managing your domain registration and renewal. DNS is the set of directions that tells a browser where to find the website and tells a mail system where to deliver email. The two can be managed by different companies.
For your practice, the useful outcome is knowing who controls each account and which settings support which service. We put those relationships into a simple map so a future change does not start with guessing which company to call.
Should we remove the old agency immediately?
First make sure the practice has working access and a recovery route for every important account. Removing the old agency too early could leave nobody able to manage a service or resolve a problem.
Once ownership and responsibilities are clear, agree on which access should remain and which can be removed. We can help document the handover and verify the agreed setup so the practice has a usable record afterward.
Sources & further reading
Vendor features and terms can change. Confirm the requirements for your account before making a change.