Who Is Listed as the Owner

The four contacts and which one counts

A domain registration has a registrant, an administrative contact, a technical contact, and a billing contact.

The registrant is the one that matters, since it is the closest thing to a recorded owner.

The other three are roles, and historically the administrative one had real power, which is why it is worth having it match.

On most small business domains all four say the same thing, and on a surprising number that thing turns out to be a person's name rather than the business.

Why a personal name is a problem

• Somebody leaves and it goes with them.
• The business is sold and it is not included.
• A partnership ends and it is disputed.
• Somebody dies and it is in an estate.
• The business rebrands and nothing matches.

The fourth is the one nobody plans for and it is genuinely difficult. A domain registered to an individual who has died becomes part of their estate, and recovering it involves an executor rather than a registrar's support desk.

Name the business exactly

Which is the specific instruction.

Use the legal name as it appears on the incorporation or registration, not the trading name and not a shortened version.

Where the two differ, the legal name goes in the registrant field and the trading name can appear elsewhere.

That matters at exactly the moments this record gets examined: a dispute, a sale, or a bank asking about assets.

A registrant reading roughly like your business is worth less than one matching a document.

The address should be one the business will still have in five years, which for many is the accountant's or the registered office rather than a rented unit.

A worked example

A business had four domains registered to one of two partners personally.

When the partnership was restructured, the domains were not in the list of business assets because nobody had thought of them.

Sorting it afterwards required a conversation neither of them wanted and a solicitor's letter to make it tidy.

The change itself, once agreed, took an hour.

Doing it in advance would have taken the same hour and no conversation.

Both of them now check it whenever anything changes.

Changing it is straightforward

And has one consequence worth knowing.

Most registrars have a change of registrant process, requiring confirmation from both the old and new contact addresses.

It takes a few days and usually costs nothing.

The consequence is that a registrant change starts a sixty-day period during which the domain cannot be transferred to another registrar.

So if you also intend to move registrars, do the move first and the ownership change afterwards.

Some registrars let you opt out of that lock, and many do not.

What the public record shows now

Which has changed and confuses people.

Registration details for individuals are largely hidden in public lookups, following privacy rules that came into effect several years ago.

Organisation names are frequently still shown, which is why a business registration is visible and a personal one is not.

For .ca domains, the registry has withheld individual registrant details for considerably longer than that.

So a lookup showing nothing does not mean nothing is recorded; the record exists and is not public.

The registrar can tell you what it says, and so can your own account.

Canadian domains have a residency requirement

Worth knowing if any of yours are .ca.

The registry requires the registrant to meet Canadian presence requirements, which a company incorporated in Canada satisfies.

A registration held personally by somebody who later leaves the country, or by a company that is not Canadian, can become a problem.

Registering in the incorporated business name is the cleanest way to satisfy it permanently.

Check that the name on your .ca matches the corporation exactly rather than a trading name.

A mismatch is worth correcting before anybody has reason to examine it.

Check it against your records

Which is the practical exercise.

Open each domain in your registrar account and read the registrant details.

Compare the name against your incorporation or registration document, character for character.

Note any that are personal, out of date, or approximate, and change those.

Add the result to the domain list, so this is recorded rather than rechecked from scratch every year.

Note the date you checked it, since that is what tells the next person whether the record can still be relied on.

The email address on it matters as much

Which is the part of the record that does actual work.

Every confirmation, every transfer approval, and every ownership change requires somebody to click a link sent to the registrant address.

An address belonging to a person who has left, or one on a domain that has itself lapsed, means none of those processes can complete.

Use a shared business address that more than one person can reach, and check it is current on every domain at the same time as the name.

That single field is what turns a domain from something you own on paper into something you can actually act on.

The counter-case

Access matters more in practice.

Whoever can log into the registrar account can move the domain regardless of what the registrant field says, so the record is a backstop rather than a control.

A sole trader with no separate legal entity also has nothing to name but themselves, which is correct rather than a problem.

And the change process is tedious enough that it is not worth doing on a domain you intend to let lapse anyway.

Do it on the ones you marked as critical earlier and leave the expendable ones exactly as they are.

Read the registrant on each domain, compare it to your registration document, and change anything personal or approximate.

The check

1. Open each domain in the registrar.
2. Read the registrant name.
3. Compare to your registration.
4. Note anything personal or approximate.
5. Use an address you will keep.
6. Do transfers first, then changes.
7. Record it in the domain list.

Step six is the ordering that saves two months, since a change of registrant blocks a transfer for sixty days and people routinely attempt both in the same week.

Getting the name right at the start is covered in registering the business name and the domain.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.