A domain name outside your contract is your risk to carry
Your website depends on a domain name that your contract may never mention. When that ownership is unclear, you are the one exposed when it matters most.
Every website depends on a domain name. Surprisingly few contracts mention who owns it.
A marketing site gets built. A web application goes live. The invoice is paid and the relationship with your studio moves on. Meanwhile the domain sits registered under an account nobody at your organisation can access. Perhaps a previous developer bought it years ago. Perhaps a staff member registered it under a personal card and left the company since. The website works, the business runs, and nobody asks the question until the day it matters.
That day usually arrives at the worst moment. Renewal notices go to an email address nobody checks. A supplier relationship ends and the party holding the registration is no longer willing to help. You decide to change studios and discover the new team cannot point the domain anywhere without a password only one person holds. None of this is a technical problem. It is a contractual gap that became your problem the moment you stopped paying attention to it.
Who actually holds the account
Domain registration and web development are separate services, even when one studio handles both. The registrar account, the billing details and the administrative contact on record determine who has real control. A studio that builds your site well can still leave you exposed if the domain sits in their name, or in the name of whoever set it up years before you signed anything.
Ask directly who owns the registrar account before work begins. Ask what happens to that account if the relationship ends. A studio working at a fixed price should be able to answer both questions without hesitation, because the answer should already be part of how they operate, not something worked out after a dispute begins.
A domain left outside the contract becomes your risk exactly when you need control the most.
What belongs inside the contract
A contract covering design, build and launch should also state plainly that the domain is registered in your name, on your account, with your organisation as the administrative contact. It should say who pays the renewal and who holds the credentials once the project ends. None of this is unusual to ask for. It is unusual only because so many contracts leave it out.
If you are reviewing a proposal now, look for this clause before you look at anything else. A studio confident in its own pricing and its own process will have no difficulty putting your ownership of the domain in writing. If the clause is missing, ask for it. The cost of asking is nothing. The cost of not asking arrives later, at a moment you did not choose.