Who Owns Your Domain? The Ownership Trap Hurting Nepali Businesses

Quick question. Who owns your domain, the web address on your signboard, your visiting cards, your Daraz store profile? If your honest answer is "my website guy handles that", there's a real chance the answer is: your website guy owns it. Not you. This is the single most damaging ownership trap in Nepal's web industry, and most victims discover it at the worst possible moment: when they try to leave.

How the Trap Gets Set

It's rarely malicious at the start. You hire a designer in 2022. They say "don't worry, we'll handle the domain", and they register yourbusiness.com or yourbusiness.com.np under their own registrar account, with their email as the contact. Convenient for everyone. The site launches, years pass, renewal invoices get paid, nobody thinks about it. Legally and practically, though, the domain belongs to whoever controls that registrar account. You've been paying rent on your own name.

When the Trap Springs

The trap stays invisible until something changes. You want to switch to a cheaper host, or a better designer, or your designer stops answering Viber, or closes shop, or, occasionally, realises the domain is leverage and reprices accordingly. We've seen a Chitwan resort quoted NPR 60,000 to "release" a domain that costs about NPR 1,500 a year to renew. We've seen a Kathmandu training institute lose a domain entirely because the freelancer holding it let it expire during a dispute; it was bought by a domain squatter within days, along with the Google rankings built over five years. Email is the quiet casualty too: if your staff use info@yourbusiness.com, whoever holds the domain can read, redirect or kill your business email.

Check Your Ownership in Five Minutes, Today

• Find the registrar account. Ask directly: "Which registrar is our domain with, and what email is the account under?" For .com.np domains, ask the same about the Mercantile/register.com.np record.
• Run a WHOIS lookup. Free at any whois site. If the registrant email is your designer's Gmail, you have your answer.
• Test the login. Real ownership means you can log in to the registrar yourself, from your own email, and see the domain listed. Anything less is a promise, not ownership.

If you pass all three: excellent, you're in the safe minority. Set the domain to auto-renew and put the renewal date in your phone calendar anyway.

Getting Your Domain Back

If you're in the trap, act while relations are good. Don't open with accusations; most designers did this out of habit, not scheming, and will cooperate. Ask for a transfer of the domain into a registrar account you create with your own email, or at minimum for the registrant details to be changed to yours. Expect to pay any genuine outstanding renewal fees, that's fair. What isn't fair is a "release fee" many times the renewal cost; that's when it's worth mentioning, calmly, that you're taking advice on the matter. For .com.np domains, Nepali registration authorities side with the party whose business documents match the domain, which is usually decisive. Recovery while the designer is reachable takes a week. Recovery after they've disappeared can take months, or fail. Timing is everything.

The Rule That Prevents All of This

One sentence, said before any project starts: "The domain will be registered in an account I control, with my email." Any professional worth hiring agrees instantly. At WebsNP this is simply policy: your domain sits in your name from day one, free for the first year with every design package, and on final payment you own the domain, the code, and the hosting outright, with the logins in your inbox to prove it. We built the policy after seeing too many businesses learn this lesson the expensive way. A domain costs a couple of thousand rupees a year. Owning it, versus renting it from your own vendor, is worth incomparably more. Go check yours now, before you forget. It genuinely takes five minutes.