Your developer owns your domain. Here is how to find out, and get it back.

You paid for the website. You've been paying monthly ever since. And when you asked for the login to your own domain, the answer was slow, then vague, then nothing at all.

This happens more often than most merchants realise, and it's usually more recoverable than it feels on the day you find out. Here's how to work out exactly what you own, in the right order, before you pay anybody to fix it.

First, separate four things that aren't the same

People say "my website" as if it's one thing. It's really four, held in four different places, and you can own some of them without owning the rest.

1. The domain. Held at a registrar such as Namecheap, GoDaddy or Cloudflare. Whoever controls the registrar account controls where the domain points, and can move it or let it expire.
2. The hosting. The server the site runs on. It's a separate account with a separate bill, often at a different company entirely.
3. The store admin. Your login to the site itself. An administrator and a limited user who can edit product descriptions are very different things.
4. The merchant account. The processor that takes the card payments and decides which bank account the money lands in.

A developer can hand over number three, which feels like a handover, and keep one, two and four. That's the situation to check for.

Check the domain yourself, right now

This takes two minutes and costs nothing.

Look up your domain on a public WHOIS service such as ICANN Lookup. You're looking for two things: the registrar (the company the domain is registered through) and the registrant or admin contact.

Most domains now show redacted contact details for privacy, so you may not see a name. That's normal and doesn't prove anything. You can always see the registrar and the expiry date, though. Write both down.

Then ask yourself the question that settles it: have you ever logged into that registrar? We mean the registrar itself, not the website editor. If you've never had an account there and renewal notices have never reached your inbox, the domain isn't in your control, whoever's name is on it.

The rest of the checklist

Be straight with yourself on these. Any one of them is fixable. If several apply, the business is running on somebody else's permission.

• Domain renewal notices go to an inbox that isn't yours.
• You've never logged into the registrar or the host, only into the site.
• Your store login isn't a full administrator.
• You can't download a complete backup by yourself.
• The payment processor account is in the developer's business name.
• Cancelling the monthly fee would take the site offline.

Watch for that last one most. If stopping payment kills the site, you're renting your own business back.

What's usually recoverable

More than people expect. Registrars and hosts care about account records and billing. They don't care who wrote the code.

If the account is in your name and you've lost access, the provider's own account-recovery process exists for exactly this. The evidence that tends to count is billing records, the card the renewals were charged to, and access to the email on the account.

If the domain is registered to a company you paid, you can request a transfer. A domain transfer needs the authorisation code from the current registrar, and the domain has to be unlocked. A cooperative developer sends both. An uncooperative one won't, and there's no button that overrides them.

If the developer has just gone quiet, you're in the most common situation, and it's usually workable. Going quiet isn't the same as refusing, and providers respond to account holders, whoever's shouting loudest.

What isn't recoverable, and when to stop trying

If a domain is registered in someone else's name and they actively refuse to release it, no agency can force it. You have the registrar's dispute process, and after that, a lawyer. Both are slow, and neither is certain.

There's a decision here that people put off for months: at some point a new domain is cheaper than the fight. A domain costs about the price of a coffee run per year. Weeks of dispute cost you every sale you missed while your store was down. If the products are the business and the domain is six months old with no real search ranking behind it, start again on a new one. You can still chase the old one in parallel if you want to.

It's a different call if the domain is ten years old and carries every link and ranking you have. That one's worth fighting for. The right advice depends on which of those you are, and anyone who gives you the same answer either way isn't looking at your situation.

Two things to do before you hire anyone

Get your data out. Export your product catalogue, your customer list and your order history today, using whatever access you still have. If that access gets cut off later, this export decides whether you're doing a migration or rebuilding from screenshots.

Change the email on anything you control. Password resets go through email. If your recovery address is still an account somebody else can read, fix that before anything else.

Only then should you work out what a rebuild is worth. We start every migration with an audit that tells you which of those four things are in your name, and we'll tell you the answer even if it doesn't lead to work for us. Send us your site and what you can and can't log into.