Your domain is the only part you get to keep
A website builder rents you an editor, a template and some hosting. The domain name and the mailbox attached to it are different in kind — they outlive the subscription, and they are the two things a provider can quietly end up holding on your behalf. This desk files what each provider actually registers, what year two costs, and whether you can leave with the name.
The free domain
Free for twelve months, then billed at whatever the provider charges that year. Four providers, their registration terms side by side, and the renewal question you have to ask before you pay.
The business mailbox
Almost nobody includes it. What you are actually buying is a reseller seat on Google or Microsoft, and the day it lapses your address stops receiving mail with no warning page.
Getting the name out
Unlock, authorisation code, approval — plus the sixty-day locks written into ICANN policy that decide whether you can start at all this month.
From the card index
Every card
Cancel the Plan, Keep the Name
Cancelling a website builder subscription is meant to end one relationship. Done in the wrong order it ends three, and two of them are the ones you needed. Here is the sequence that leaves you holding the domain and the mailbox.
Expired Domains and the Redemption Window
A domain that lapses does not vanish. It goes through a sequence of stages with names, durations and fees, most of them set by policy rather than by your provider. Knowing the sequence is the difference between a nuisance and a loss.
Who Really Provides Your Website Builder's Email
The product is called Business Email. The company operating it is usually Google or Microsoft, and the company you can phone is neither. Knowing which is which changes what you do when something breaks.
Email on a Moving Domain: Keeping the Mailbox Alive
A website that goes down is noticed within the hour. A mailbox that stops accepting mail fails silently, and the people it fails are the ones trying to give you money. Here is what to protect while a domain changes hands.
Keeping Your Domain When You Move Website Builders
Changing platform is a decision about software. Your domain is not software — it is a registration with its own owner, its own expiry date and its own rules, and it survives the change only if you treat it as a separate thing.
Domain Privacy and the Registration Record, Without the Scare Stories
Privacy services are sold with a story about spam and stalkers. The real reason to understand them is duller and more important: privacy sits between you and the one email that lets you move your name.
One subject, filed properly
There is no shortage of advice about which website builder has the nicer templates. There is very little about the paperwork underneath it: the registration record with somebody's name on it, the voucher that expires in month thirteen, the mailbox that is really a reseller seat on somebody else's mail service.
That paperwork is what this desk covers. Nothing here ranks editors or scores drag-and-drop. Every card answers a custody question — who holds the name, who can release it, what it costs to keep, and what stops working the day you stop paying.
Where to start
If a provider has offered you a domain as part of a plan and you have not signed yet, read free domain website builder plans first. It sets the four offers side by side on their registration terms rather than their headline prices.
If you already have the plan and the name, and you want to know whose name is on the registration record, the card on who owns the domain your builder registered shows you how to read the record yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it.
If the mailbox is the thing worrying you, business email with a website builder explains what is actually being resold to you and what happens on the day it stops being paid for.
How claims are handled here
Three kinds of statement appear on this site and they are never blended. Policy is quoted from ICANN's published text and applies to every registrar of a generic top-level domain whether they like it or not. Provider terms are quoted from the provider's own current help documentation, with the page named. Everything else is our reading, and it is written so you can tell.
Every claim is filed under one of three tabs
Policy
Quoted from ICANN’s published text. Binds every registrar of a generic top-level domain.
Provider terms
Quoted from the provider’s own current help documentation, with the page named.
Our reading
Everything else — written so you can tell it is ours.
Prices are the fragile part. A registration fee is a number a company chooses and can change on any Tuesday, so a figure appears here only with the currency it was quoted in and the date it was read. Where a provider does not publish a renewal price at all — and most of them do not publish it anywhere a prospective customer can find it — this site says so rather than inventing one.