If you are reading this article it is likely that you have discovered that your company is not the legal registrant of your companies domain name.
Why Is Updating the Domain Name Registrant to Your Company Name Important?
If your domain is registered under an employee’s name, web developer, or IT provider, your business may not legally own it. This can be risky if that person leaves, becomes uncooperative, or is unavailable in the future.
Your domain name is a valuable digital asset. If it’s not under the company name, it can create legal and logistical complications when selling the business or restructuring in the future.
Why Was The Domain Name Registrant Not Correct Initially?
3 reasons:
- Third-Party Registration: A web agency or freelance developer may have registered the domain on your behalf and used their own details
- Oversight or Haste: The domain might have been quickly registered during the startup phase using personal details
- Lack of Understanding: Some well meaning employee of the businesses didn’t realise that the registrant is the legal owner, not just the account holder or user
How to Fix the Domain Name Registrant with a NZ Registrar
Follow these steps to update the registrant:
- Who is the current Registrant?
- Search for your own domain name from any NZ domain name registrar such as 1stdomains
- Next to the domain name it will say “unavailable” (because it is already registered) and there will also be a “whois” link
- Click the “whois” link to see a list of details including contact details for the domain name. You are looking for the “Registrant” near the top (don’t be confused by the “Registrar” which is simply the current Domain Name Registrar
- Note down the full registrant name which will either be a persons name or a company name, and if you are lucky, the mobile/phone number and email address will still work and can be used to contact this person
- For example, here’s a screenshot of the whois lookup for CreativeQ.co.nz which has our founder, Steve Turner as the registrant instead of our company name “Creative Q Ltd” so we’ll need to follow this process ourselves eventually!
- Find the Change-of-Registrant-Form
- In this day-and-age you’d think the next step would be to fill in an online form, but nope. The process has not changed for 15+ years. It involves a PDF and you will need to get it signed by multiple people, so you will need to email it around and if not everyone uses Adobe Acrobat or a PDF editor, there may be a couple of rounds of printing and scanning involved!
- For the Domain Registrar where the Domain Name is registered, do a search for “Change of Registrant Form”
- For example, here is the form for 1stDomains: http://www.1stdomains.co.nz/client/change_of_registrant.pdf
- Fill in the form
- Get started filling in the form, and sign your part as the legal owner
- Next, you will need to get a signature from the previous owner. This part can be a bit tricky because the previous owner may be overseas, retired, or sometimes the company name went into liquidation or no longer exists! So do the best you can with this part. As a backup, the DNC “Domain Name Commission NZ” https://dnc.org.nz/ can help untangle ownership issues for third parties are no longer contactable
- Submit the completed form
- Once you’ve submitted the form, it can take a week or 2 for the change to come through
- Normally there is no cost for this, but if the domain name is close to expiry, you might need to renew it for another year first
