Your domain and hosting must be in your name: here is why
Your domain and your hosting must be registered to you: your email, your accounts, your payment method. If they are in your developer’s name, your web presence has a landlord, and you find out the day you disagree about an invoice, the day the developer disappears, or the day you simply want to switch providers. I register everything in the client’s name on every project, and it is billed apart precisely so ownership is never mixed with my fee.
What “in your name” concretely means
The domain is registered at a registrar (Namecheap, Cloudflare, GoDaddy) under an account whose email is yours and whose recovery methods are yours. Hosting and any connected services (the database, the email sender) follow the same rule. Your developer gets access as a collaborator, which you can grant and revoke; being a collaborator is normal, being the owner is not.
The email detail is the one people miss. An account “in your name” recovered through the developer’s inbox is in the developer’s name with extra steps. Ownership follows the recovery email.
How businesses lose their domains
Rarely through malice, usually through friction. The agency that registered your domain in 2019 shuts down, and the renewal notice goes to a dead inbox until the domain expires and a squatter buys it. The freelancer who “handles all that” stops answering, and moving your site now requires proving to a registrar that you are you, which takes weeks when it works. Or a billing dispute turns your website into leverage, because technically it runs on accounts that are not yours.
Every one of those stories starts the same way: it was easier at the time to let someone else register it. The recovery, when possible, costs far more than the USD 10 to 20 a year the domain costs to hold properly. This is one of the classic ways cheap web development gets expensive.
What to check today, in 10 minutes
Look up your domain in a WHOIS service, or simpler: try to log into your registrar. Can you? Is the account email yours? Does the renewal charge hit your card? Do the same for hosting. If any answer is no, fix it now, while your relationship with whoever holds it is good: transfers between friendly parties take a day; transfers from vanished parties take months.
If you are hiring someone new, make ownership an explicit question before starting; it belongs on the list in questions to ask your developer.
How I handle it
Domain and hosting are billed apart from the project price and set up in accounts you own from day zero. At handover you receive every credential: registrar, hosting, analytics, everything. If you already have a domain trapped in someone else’s account, untangling it can be part of the project. My favorite sentence at the end of a handover is “you could fire me tomorrow and lose nothing”, because it is true, and because a client who stays should stay by choice.
Frequently asked questions
My developer says it is simpler if they manage everything. Is that wrong?
Managing is fine, owning is not. The healthy setup is accounts in your name with the developer as a collaborator. Same convenience for them, zero hostage risk for you.
What does a domain actually cost?
USD 10 to 20 per year for a normal .com at an honest registrar. If you are paying much more “for the domain” inside a bundle, you are paying for something else without seeing it.
How do I recover a domain from a developer who disappeared?
Through the registrar’s recovery process, proving business ownership, and it is slow and uncertain. If the domain expired, you may face buying it from a squatter. This is the scenario the whole article exists to prevent.
If I switch developers, what happens to my site?
If everything is in your name: you revoke one collaborator, invite another, and nothing goes down. That is the entire point, and it is how I set up every project I deliver.
Check your registrar today, and if you want a project set up correctly from day zero: Message me on WhatsApp and you will have a fixed price and a delivery date in writing within 48 hours.