Free Domain With Your Website: What It Really Means

“Free domain with your website” means one of three things in practice: the domain is registered to the contractor, not to you; only the first year is free and renewal comes at an inflated price; or the domain’s cost is honestly built into the plan. A domain itself costs €20–50 a year, so the real question is not the money but who legally owns your business address.

What hides behind the word “free”?

A domain is a yearly paid service from a registrar, so it is only ever “free” at someone’s expense. The market runs on three schemes.

The first scheme is the most dangerous because it is invisible: the site works, the address looks right, and for years nobody checks whose name is on the domain. Often it is not even bad intent, just the contractor’s habit: registering to themselves is faster, since there is no need to collect your details and hand over access. The second scheme is more honest but requires reading the price list to the end: registrars and agencies attract with the first-year price and earn on renewals. The third is how we work, more on that below.

What does a domain actually cost?

The market price of a domain is €20–50 a year depending on the zone, and a cheap registration does not always mean a cheap renewal. A low first-year price is a standard trick: renewal often turns out pricier than registration. So a “gift” domain saves you at most €50 in the first year. If renewal is then billed at an inflated price, the gift pays for itself, for the seller, by year two. And if the domain is also registered to someone else, those €50 bought away your control over the business address.

Why does the name on the domain matter?

A site can be rebuilt, moved to another host, or made again from scratch. A domain does not work that way: it is the address your clients know, the one printed on business cards and linked from every directory and map listing. Changing the address means new cards, updates in every directory, and clients who type the old address and land nowhere. The domain is controlled by whoever it is registered to: only the owner decides where it points and whether it gets renewed next year. If that owner is your contractor, your presence online rests on your relationship with them.

The hostage domain: a real case

A client came to us with a finished site that needed maintenance. While checking it over, we found that the domain was registered to the previous contractor. For years the client had been paying for a site whose address legally belonged to someone else, without suspecting a thing. To fix it, we had to track down that contractor, come to an agreement, file a request with the registrar imena.ua, and run the official change of ownership. It ended well: the domain is now in the client’s name. But the whole procedure rested on the old contractor answering messages and having no objections. Had he vanished or changed his mind, the client would have had very little leverage.

How does pageever handle domains?

With us the domain is registered to the client from day one, no exceptions: we only manage it, meaning we set up DNS, watch the deadlines, and renew it every year. Registration and yearly renewal are part of the subscription: the Basic plan costs €96 a year and covers the domain, hosting, SSL, daily backups, monitoring, and up to 5 simple edits a month. The market logic where renewal costs more than registration never reaches you inside the subscription: the plan price is fixed, whatever renewal costs in your domain’s zone. We are partners of the registrar imena.ua, so domain matters are handled directly with the registrar. The domain’s expiry date is also checked daily by our monitoring, together with SSL and the lead form, so an expiring domain shows up as a Telegram alert to us, not as a dead site to your visitors. For sites built elsewhere, the same monitoring is available separately at €50 a year.

What happens to the domain if you decide to leave?

The domain is yours either way, so the only question is transferring control. We write a letter and file a request with the registrar, and the domain moves into your personal account at imena.ua. The procedure takes one to five business days, usually one or two. You will not have to buy back your own address: it is a routine operation we agree on with the client at the very start. The same timeline works in the other direction too: if you come to us with a domain registered to someone else, we help re-register it in your name, which is exactly what happened in the story above.

How do you check who owns your domain?

If a contractor built your site, ask them directly: who is the domain registered to, at which registrar, and what does the yearly renewal cost. Look into the contract and invoices too: if there is no separate line for the domain at all, ask where the domain came from and who pays for it. Public WHOIS data is hidden by privacy services in many zones, so the most reliable check is access to the registrar account. If you do not have it and the contractor is slow to share it, that is your answer. Re-registering the domain in your own name is a 1–5 business day procedure through a registrar request, and it is easier to go through it now than to hunt down a former contractor later.