Who actually owns your domain? A five-minute check.

A domain is registered through a company called a registrar, inside an account that belongs to whoever set it up. For a lot of small businesses that was a web designer, a nephew, a former employee or a marketing company from ten years ago. Everything works until the card on that account expires, or that person leaves, or someone else gets into the account.

In October 2026 we looked at a Grand Strand manufacturer whose domain’s settings had been changed in September so that every visitor was sent on to a gambling site, and two local businesses whose domains had only weeks left before they expired.

The five-minute check

1. Look up the public recordType your domain into our free domain check. It shows when the domain expires, which registrar holds it, whether it’s locked against transfers, and whether its record changed recently.
2. Log in to the registrar yourselfGo to that registrar’s website and sign in. If you can’t, because you don’t know the login or it was never yours, that’s the finding. Ask whoever set it up to move the domain into an account in the business’s name.
3. Check the name and email on the accountThey should be the business and an email address the business controls, not a personal Gmail or someone who left. Renewal notices and transfer approvals go to that address.
4. Turn on auto-renew and check the cardAn expired card is the most common way a business loses a domain it has had for years. Renew for several years at once if your registrar allows it.
5. Turn on the transfer lock and two-step sign-inBoth are free switches in the registrar account. The lock stops the domain being moved away; two-step sign-in stops someone logging in with a stolen password.

What a hijacked domain looks like

• Your website suddenly goes somewhere else, on every page, from every device.
• Your email stops arriving, or customers say mail from you looks strange.
• The domain check shows the record changed recently and nobody on your side changed it.
• Your registrar sends a notice about a change you didn’t make. Read those emails instead of deleting them.

If any of those happen, change the registrar password from a clean device and call the registrar the same day. Speed matters: a domain moved to another registrar is far harder to get back.

If you’ve already lost it

Sometimes the domain lapsed years ago and someone else now owns it. There are still options, depending on how it was lost: buying it back quietly through a broker, a trademark-based dispute, or an attorney’s letter. Don’t contact the new owner angrily first; it usually raises the price. Our guide on when an old web designer’s domain expires covers the old addresses still sitting in footers and directory listings.