Domain, hosting, website: three separate things
Most confusion about domains comes from treating the website as one purchase. It is three.
| What it is | Paid to | Typical cost | Must be in your name? | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain name | The address: yourbusiness.co.uk | A registrar, yearly | Roughly £5–£30 a year for .co.uk and .com | Yes, always |
| Hosting | The server where the site’s files live | A hosting company, monthly or yearly | From a few pounds a month; from £50 with care included, on this site | Ideally; or in an account you can be given |
| Website | The files and database: the pages, the design, the content | Whoever builds it | From £500 with us | Yes, by contract, with a copy on request |
Source: Cybrial. Registrar prices vary by extension and registrar and are published by each; our hosting and build prices are correct at 5 September 2026.
The domain is pointed at the hosting by DNS records, which is the part of the settings that says “yourbusiness.co.uk lives at this server”. Move hosts and you change the record; the domain stays yours. Lose the domain and it does not matter where the site is hosted, because nobody can reach it.
How to buy and register one
- Choose the name. Short, spellable over the phone, your business name if available. Avoid hyphens and numbers unless they are part of the brand.
- Choose the extension. For a UK business, .co.uk is expected and trusted; .com is worth taking as well if it is free, and pointing at the same site. Newer extensions are fine for tech businesses and slightly odd for a plumber.
- Search a registrar (Nominet lists accredited registrars for .uk; many hosts are also registrars) and register it for one to five years. Longer registration removes the annual chance to forget.
- Register it in your own name, your own business address and an email address you will still have in five years, not one at the domain you are buying.
- Turn on auto-renew and add a calendar note for the renewal anyway. Domains lapse when a card expires; the guide on renewing covers what happens then.
- Turn on registrar lock, which stops the domain being transferred away without your confirmation.
Who owns a domain, and how to check yours
A great many UK searches ask who owns a domain, and for a business owner the important version is “who owns mine?”. The registrant — the person or company named on the registration — owns it. Not the person who paid, not the person whose website sits on it.
- For a .uk domain, Nominet’s WHOIS at nominet.uk shows the registrant type and, for businesses, the name. Search your own domain.
- For .com and most others, use a WHOIS or RDAP lookup; the registrant is often redacted for privacy, in which case the registrar named is the place to log in and check.
- If you have never had a login to a registrar for your own domain, someone else is the registrant. Find out who, today.
If someone else owns yours
It is common and usually fixable. Ask the registrant to transfer the domain to a registrar account in your name; a cooperative supplier does it in a day. If they refuse, Nominet has a dispute process for .uk domains and ICANN-accredited registrars have one for .com, both of which weigh heavily in favour of the business whose name and trade the domain carries. Start the conversation before a relationship sours, because the leverage disappears when the supplier does.
What the domain does and does not do for search
Less than people think. Having your trade in the name (manchesterplumbing.co.uk) is a small help at most; Google ranks the pages and the reputation, not the letters in the address. What matters is keeping the same domain for years, because its history of links and rankings is attached to it. Changing domain is a migration with redirects, and it is one of the riskier things a business does to its search traffic. Pick one you can live with and keep it.
