Every month or two we get a version of the same call. "Our web guy left" or "the person who set this up retired," and now the website needs a change, or email has stopped working, and nobody in the business knows where anything lives or has a single password. Sometimes the domain itself is registered in a former contractor's personal account. The business does not actually control its own name on the internet.
None of this is anyone being malicious, usually. It is just that a domain, DNS, a website, and email are four separate things, and it is easy for an owner to assume they are one thing called "the website."
The four pieces, in plain terms
The registrar is where your domain name is registered and paid for, usually yearly. Whoever holds the registrar account owns the domain in every way that matters. Everything else hangs off this.
DNS is the address book for your domain. It answers questions like "where does the website live" and "where does email for this domain get delivered." DNS is often managed at the registrar, but it can live somewhere else entirely.
Web hosting is the computer your website's files actually sit on. It is a separate service with its own account and its own bill, even when the same company happens to sell you the domain too.
Email hosting is where your mailboxes live, commonly Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. It is not your website host, even though both use the same domain name.
The confusing part is that one company can provide all four, or four different companies can each provide one, and from the outside it all just looks like "our email works." It works until someone needs to change something.
The "web guy left" problem
Here is the failure mode we see. A contractor sets everything up years ago, efficiently, in their own accounts. The domain is in their registrar login. DNS points wherever they decided. The hosting bill goes to their credit card and gets invoiced back, or worse, quietly stops being paid.
Then they retire, close their business, or just stop answering email.
Now the website needs an update and nobody can log in. Or the domain comes up for renewal and the notices go to a dead mailbox, and one morning the website and every email address stop working at once. Recovering a domain from an unresponsive third party's account ranges from slow and annoying to genuinely impossible, and while you wait, your customers are bouncing.
The fix is not about firing anyone. Contractors and IT providers should absolutely manage these systems day to day. But the accounts should belong to the business, with the contractor added as a delegated user, not the other way around. If we manage a client's domain, we want the registrar account in the client's name with their card on file. That way, if anything ever happens to us, they lose nothing.
The inventory every owner should hold
You do not need to understand DNS records. You need one page, kept somewhere safe, that answers these questions:
Where is the domain registered, what is the login, and what card pays the renewal? Where is DNS managed, and what is the login? Who hosts the website, what is the login, and what does it cost per year? Who hosts email, what is the admin login, and how many mailboxes are you paying for? Whose name and email address are on each of those accounts?
Then two rules. Every account recovery email should go to an address the owner controls, never to the contractor's address and never to an address on the domain itself (if the domain breaks, you cannot receive the recovery email to fix it). And renewals should be on the business's own payment card, so a contractor's expired Visa can never take your email down.
If you cannot fill in that page today, that is worth an afternoon of digging now rather than a crisis later. We put this on the list in our tech checklist for opening a shop, because it is far easier to set up correctly on day one than to untangle in year six.
If your setup is a mystery even to you, we can help you trace where everything lives, move the accounts into your name, and keep it all running without holding your keys hostage. That is exactly what our hosting and domain services are for, and the audit is a lot cheaper than a lost domain.
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.