Your domain:
in your name

For a .es you check it in the Red.es WHOIS: you type in the domain and the registrant appears, without logging into any account. For a .com most registrars hide that information for privacy, so the route is different: log into the account from which the renewal is paid each year and look for the contact marked as registrant, holder or owner — not the technical or administrative contact, which usually belong to whoever manages the website rather than whoever owns the domain. If you don't have access to that account, you already have your answer: you don't control it. Another quick and dirty sign: try creating a new email address on that domain. If you can do it without asking anyone's permission, you control the DNS and, with it, the domain. If you have to ask, you don't control it, whatever the paperwork says.

Yes, even if it goes unnoticed for years. As long as that person stays contactable and in a good mood, everything works: they renew, they reply, they make whatever change you ask for. The problem comes the day they're no longer available, change business, fall out with you over an invoice or simply don't answer. That day you need them to sign off a transfer, and if they won't or can't, your business depends on the goodwill of a third party who no longer has any reason to help you. It's not an unusual scenario: it happens with freelancers who close down, agencies that disappear and collaborations that end badly. The time saved at the start by letting someone else register it is paid for later, when it's no longer a five-minute formality but a negotiation, or worse. The solution isn't to distrust the designer: it's for the domain to be born in your name from day one, even if they're the one who clicks "register".

Yes, and in many cases it's the healthiest option. Domain and hosting are two separate contracts even if the same provider sells them together: one points a name to an address, the other hosts the website's files. They don't have to live with the same company, and separating them reduces the risk that a problem with your web provider also takes your business name down with it. What does matter, wherever each piece lives, is who appears as the holder on each contract. The hosting can be in the name of whoever manages the website technically, because changing it is just a matter of migrating files. The domain can't: if it isn't in your name, the day you want to move it you depend on someone else authorising it, and that's where the problems start. Keep the login details for both, even if you use the same company for each.

Start by gathering whatever proves the business is yours: invoices for the website or the domain in your name, screenshots of the live website with your brand, any contract or quote in which you appear as the client. The more complete the file, the easier the process. Then contact the registrar where the domain is registered: most have a change-of-registrant procedure for these cases, and for .es domains the same mechanism exists through Red.es. It isn't instant or always simple, and sometimes requires several rounds of paperwork, but it's a route that exists and is followed with documents, not luck. In the meantime, don't let the domain expire: if the vanished provider also stops paying the renewal, you lose it without anyone warning you, and then anyone else can register it. Keep an eye on the expiry date even if you don't control the account.

Yes, entirely. The business's email addresses depend on the domain's DNS records, and whoever controls those records decides where that email goes and who can read it. If the domain is in someone else's name, that person could technically redirect your email, create new accounts or simply stop renewing the domain and make all your addresses stop working at once: orders, invoices, customer messages, all lost on the same day. It's the part people think about least when talking about domain ownership, because it seems to be just about the website, when in fact it affects email first. If you lost access to the domain tomorrow, how many email accounts would stop working, and how long would it take you to notice? That question, more than the website, is what should make you check today whose name it's registered in.

No, and that difference is the key to the whole problem. Hosting can be changed: if you're no longer happy with the provider, you migrate the files and the database somewhere else, point the domain at the new server and, within a day or two, the website is working again in its new home. It's a technical process with some hassle, but no obstacle beyond the work of doing it. The domain doesn't work like that: if it isn't yours, you don't "migrate" it, because there's no technical process that gives you back something that never belonged to you. You need whoever appears as the registrant to agree to transfer it, and if they won't, there's no technical shortcut to fix it. That's why the domain is the piece that really needs protecting from the start: hosting is reversible with effort; someone else's domain isn't, without that person's cooperation.

Yes, as an explicit line, not as something taken for granted. A complete website quote should state clearly whose name the domain will be in, whose name the registrar account used to manage it will be in, and whose name the hosting will be in: you or your company, not the agency or the designer. If that line doesn't appear anywhere, don't assume it's settled in your favour: ask before signing and before paying the first invoice, because afterwards it's much harder to put right. A serious provider has no problem writing it down, because it's exactly what they're going to do anyway. If someone resists putting it in writing or treats it as an unimportant detail, it's the clearest sign that, for that provider, keeping control of the domain isn't an oversight but a way of holding on to the client.

Yes, and that's how we always do it: if we register the domain, we register it directly in your name or your company's, never in ours. If the domain already exists and is in someone else's name, we transfer it to a registrar account that you control, with your own login details, not ours kept "for convenience". We don't hold on to anyone's business name, not least because it would make no sense: the day you stopped working with us, your website and email would have to keep working without depending on our goodwill, just as we ask any previous provider to do for you. If right now you don't know whose name your domain is in, it's the first thing we check before touching anything else: a website can be rebuilt, but the domain has to be set up properly from day one.