Your domain name sits underneath your website and your email. Most owners only think about it when the renewal notice turns up, which is pretty normal. Three jobs over the last couple of months all came back to the same thing, though: who could change the domain, and what happened when they did.

A login that could delete everything

The first was a community kindergarten moving to Microsoft 365. Their registrar had no delegated access. There was one login, and whoever had it could change the billing details, transfer the domain to someone else or delete it.

So anyone handed that login to make a small change could do all of that too. The plan was to ask the registrar for delegated access, which lets a second person make changes without holding the owner's login. If the registrar couldn't do that, the fallback was to get the transfer code and move the domain to a registrar that can.

A DNS change that broke email a year later

The second came up in August. About a year earlier, a website contractor had changed the business's DNS records, the settings that tell the internet where your website and email live. Microsoft relies on some of those records to confirm the business owns the domain.

Microsoft de-verified the domain. Staff email addresses fell back to the default onmicrosoft.com address that every Microsoft 365 tenant starts with, so mail was going out under that address instead of the business name.

My advice here is simple. Before anyone touches your DNS, they should know what's already there and what depends on it.

A name too long to say out loud

The third was a practitioner whose domain was too long to read out over the phone without spelling it.

We registered a shorter name that's easy to say, and a second name to protect a future project. If you'll ever say your web address on the phone, say it out loud a few times before you buy it.

Who should own the domain

auDA sets the rules for who can hold a .au domain name. Whoever is named on the registration is the registrant, and for a business domain that should be your business.

When we register a domain for a client, we do it under the client's business name and ABN, so the business is the registrant. The client doesn't have to manage the registrar account, and we look after the DNS records as part of website care.

Four things to check today

  • Where is your domain registered, and who has the login?
  • Is the business, under its own name and ABN, the registrant?
  • Does the registrar let you give someone access without sharing the main login?
  • Does anyone changing your DNS know which records your email depends on?

If you're working out what a new website involves, our guide to website costs in Geelong covers the domain side as well. When we build a site through our web design work, your business is the registrant. If you only check one thing from the list above, I'd make it the first.