Your website was built by a studio or a freelancer you know, and they did a good job. You pay for ads, run social media pages, and customers find you on Google. But there is one small thing owners rarely check: who the domain is registered to. A domain is the address of your site, for example yourcompany.com.ua. It exists separately from the site itself, and it has an owner. If the studio once registered the address and put it in its own name, formally the “master” of your website is the studio, not you.
While relations are good, it bothers no one. Trouble starts when you fall out, the studio closes, changes its people or simply forgets to pay on time. Then the site stops opening, and with it go the address in your ads, the email on that domain and the search positions you have built up on Google.
Below: what to check in five minutes and how to move the domain into your name.
What happens if the domain is not paid for
Exact terms depend on the zone and on the registrar, the company that handles the registration. For the .ua zone there is a public regulation from Hostmaster (the administrator of .ua), version 3.5 from January 2020. According to it, when the registration term ends, the registry does not switch the address off at once: a grace status is set for 30 days. After that it is either extended automatically (and the registrar is invoiced) or deleted by the registrar, which means declining the renewal.
That is the 2020 edition, and companies in this business may have their own rules, so do not count on “there will still be a month”. For an advertiser the consequence is simple: ads keep pointing to an address that does not open, and the budget is spent until someone notices. Also, email on that domain stops working too, so customers’ messages can get lost silently. What matters more for you is this: if the studio handles payment, you will not know whether it went through until the site goes down.
The five-minute check
1. Find out where the domain is paid for. Look for invoices and renewal notices, and for a line about the address in your contract. If that fails, the public WHOIS service helps. For .ua it is on hostmaster.ua: according to Hostmaster itself, you will see the registrar, technical data and, where available, the owner’s data. For international zones (.com, .net) the ICANN Lookup service shows similar data. Owner names are often hidden there, but the registrar is visible. That is what practitioners observe, not a guarantee: any case may differ.
2. Log in to the registrar’s account. This is the site where the domain is paid for. You need an account created with your email. If it belongs to the studio, you will not see it, and that is the first warning sign.
3. Look at three lines.
- Owner (registrant). Is it you, your company or the agency? Hostmaster says it plainly: register in your own name and give your current contact details.
- Notification email. Where the registrar sends warnings that payment is ending. If it is a former employee’s mailbox, or theirs, you will not see those messages.
- Paid-until date. And whether automatic renewal is on. In its advice Hostmaster separately recommends setting it up to avoid an accidental end of delegation (the term for connecting a domain to a site).
4. If you do not know where it is paid for, that is already an answer. Do not guess: write a message (so there is a record) and ask for the service’s name, the paid-until date and the name of the registered owner.
In our experience, the address most often “lives” with whoever built the site, and the owner finds out only when the hosting or the ads need to change. That is our experience, not statistics.
About the .ua zone: do you need a sole proprietor status
This topic causes confusion. According to the Hostmaster FAQ, third-level domains com.ua, in.ua, net.ua and org.ua are available to everyone without restrictions, so neither a sole proprietorship nor a company is required for them. A second-level domain such as company.ua (without com) is allowed only to owners of a matching trademark. So when transferring a .ua domain, check which type yours is.
How to move the domain into your name
There are two ways, and they can be combined. There is no universal step-by-step guide, because registrars’ procedures differ. Here is only a general outline.
Change the owner at the same registrar. In the Hostmaster regulation this is called re-registration: the transfer of rights and obligations for the domain. Usually the registrar asks for documents and the consent of both sides. Which ones exactly, check in its rules rather than in other people’s advice.
Move it to your own account. The owner gets a transfer code from the current registrar (the regulation calls it the domain name password), and the new company uses it to move the address. Under the regulation, the current one must make sure that the code is requested by the real owner. For .ua, the help of Hosting Ukraine says the owner’s data at the current one must match your account, and the transfer itself takes 5–6 days. Note that it is better not to change name server addresses (the settings that point the domain to the site) in the middle of the process.
If you need one, we usually connect clients to Hosting Ukraine: you can register a new name there or bring an existing one. How to set up email for a domain on that hosting we described in a separate article.
Before any step, write down your DNS settings (the records that say where the site lives and where the email goes). If you lose them, the site or email may stop working.
For international zones the ICANN policy applies: after a change of owner, a 60-day lock on transfers between registrars must be imposed, though you may be allowed to opt out before the change. We checked this against the ICANN page for the 2016 edition; the 2024 edition may differ in details, so ask them.
If the studio does not answer or refuses
First write a message with a specific request: the transfer code, or re-registration to your company. If that does not help, the .UA domain has a domain name dispute resolution policy (UA-DRP), with rules in force since November 2024. It is meant for cases where a name was registered or is used in bad faith, and it rests on rights such as a trademark. Whether it suits you is better discussed with a lawyer: this is not legal advice.
Separately: if the registrar has disappeared
It happens that such a company stops operating. Under Hostmaster’s procedure, the name then goes into temporary storage at the registry: data cannot be changed until it is moved elsewhere. The data of an individual owner is not published in WHOIS in this state. If it is not moved, it will be deleted when the paid term ends. So do not put it off.
Summary: three questions to ask today
- Where is the domain paid for, and do I have access to that account?
- Who is listed as the owner there, and whose email do the messages go to?
- Until what date is it paid, and is auto-renewal on?
If the answer to any of them is “I don’t know”, move the domain now, while you are on good terms with the contractor: then they will send the code or sign a document faster. The same rule works for ad accounts: everything should be created with your email, and the contractor only gets access. We described how to remove a former contractor from accounts in the article about access, and what else should be connected to your site in the checklist for owners.
You can read how we set up advertising in the search advertising and Performance Max sections.
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