Registrant Brief
Hosting for nonprofit projects — The volunteer moves on. The registration must not go with them.
The name is renewed on a card belonging to someone who left last spring, and the reminder goes to an inbox nobody has opened since the committee changed.
The short answer
Put the organisation itself in the registrant field, use a role address rather than a person's for the contacts, switch auto-renew on — then take our standard low-cost hosting, already fairly priced for everybody, with a direct conversation if the budget really is that tight; the charity hosting page explains how we approach it.
Technically a community project asks nothing unusual of a server. What it asks for is continuity of ownership across people who come and go, and that lives entirely in the registration record: who holds the name, who receives the notices, and whether renewal depends on anybody remembering.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
NVMe
Storage on every plan
Free
Year one of the name
99.9%
Uptime, monitored
Flat
Renewal figure
Most writing on this subject is a league table funded by referral fees. This one starts somewhere less flattering to us: the commonest way a community group loses its website is not an attack or an outage. It is an expiry date nobody owned.
So the checks below are ownership checks, and the documentation they produce is the sort a treasurer and a funder will both accept without asking twice.
The registrant is the organisation, not whoever paid
The registry records one holder for a name. If that is a volunteer's personal name, the organisation does not hold its own domain — it depends on the goodwill of a former volunteer, which is a governance problem long before it becomes a technical one.
Set the registrant organisation to the group's registered or trading name. It costs nothing, it can be corrected on an existing registration, and it is the single field that survives every future change of committee.
Where the renewal notice lands
Contact roles on a registration are where continuity is won or lost. Use an address more than one person can read — a role mailbox on your own domain, not a personal one — so a notice reaching the organisation does not depend on one individual still checking their mail.
The same applies to the card. A large share of failed renewals across this trade are simply expired cards, and recovering those is the cheapest work there is. Auto-renew plus a card the organisation controls removes the whole category.
Expiry, grace, redemption, auction
Miss a renewal and most endings run through four stages. First the name stops resolving. Then comes a grace period of around thirty days in which an ordinary renewal still works. Then redemption, where recovery costs several times the renewal. Then an open auction, where anybody can take it.
Every stage is dearer and less certain than the renewal that would have avoided it, and the third and fourth are where a project's back catalogue of links, printed leaflets and funder references quietly stops working.
Renewing early loses you nothing. Where the ending allows an extra year, that year lands on top of the term you already hold rather than replacing it.
A handover pack that survives a full change of volunteers
Write down four things and keep them with the constitution: the registrar, the registrant organisation as recorded, the expiry date, and who can read the admin contact address. That is the whole of it, and it is what a new committee needs on day one.
Invoices sit in the client area rather than in one person's inbox, and auto-renew switches off — or on — with a toggle in the account rather than a telephone call. Nothing in the arrangement requires institutional memory.
The hosting under the name. In our range that means the Sprint plan — SSL, the move and mail already inside, renewal charged at the order rate, and an upgrade path so this decision never has to be made twice. Order annually and the first year of the name's registration is on us.
Free hosting is the trap worth naming here. Adverts inserted into your pages, or an address on a borrowed subdomain, undermine exactly the credibility the mission depends on — and a borrowed subdomain is not a registration, so there is nothing to take with you when it ends.
A daily copy on every plan, with the restore in your hands: files, databases or both, without opening a ticket.
Declared interest, plainly
We would rather sell you one registration you keep for ten years than three you abandon. That is a commercial preference as much as a principled one, and saying so seems better than pretending to be disinterested.
Year two on the hosting costs what year one cost, because the order rate and the renewal rate are the same figure.
- Registrant set to the organisation
- Role contacts rather than personal ones
- Auto-renew, on one switch
- Invoices in the client area, not one inbox
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Ownership that outlives the committee
The organisation goes in the registrant field, so the name belongs to the project rather than to whoever happened to set it up.
Nothing depends on remembering
Auto-renew on one switch, invoices in the client area, and the renewal figure fixed at the rate you registered at.
Year one of the name included
Order an annual plan and the first year of the registration is on us — restricted funding never has to cover it twice.
The essentials inside, not added on
Certificate, migration, backups and mail included, rather than sold back to you as extras.
A desk with patience for volunteers
DNS and mail questions from a beginner get answered rather than redirected, at whatever hour the volunteer is free.
The verdict, turned into an order
Everything above points at the Sprint plan: a single rate, the essentials inside it, upgradeable without a migration.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Correct the registrant field first
The organisation's name in the holder record. It costs nothing, it can be done on a name you already have, and it is the field that matters in a dispute.
- 2
Move the contacts to a role address
A mailbox two or three people can read, on your own domain. Renewal notices should reach the organisation, not an individual.
- 3
Write the four-line handover note
Registrar, registrant, expiry date, who reads the admin contact. Keep it with the constitution and a new committee is never starting from nothing.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- An annual plan carries the first year of the name
- Auto-renew, so the name never lapses
- Free WHOIS privacy at registration and at every renewal
- Free certificates on every plan, reissued before expiry
- Invoices in the client area rather than one person's inbox
- Mail answering at the registered name, not a borrowed one
- cPanel, so every tutorial you find matches your screen
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ further applications
- A rehearsal copy to break before the live site ever sees it
- Filtering standing in front of each mailbox from the first day
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
What can you do for a project with almost no budget?
Talk to us rather than hunt for a discount code. Our ordinary rates are already low and we would sooner understand the project and the money you have than perform a reduction. The charity hosting page sets out how we think about it, and the conversation costs nothing.
Who should be recorded as holding the name when trustees change yearly?
The organisation, every time. Individuals go in the contact roles, and even there use an address more than one person can read. A registration held personally becomes an asset in somebody's estate or a bargaining chip in a falling-out, neither of which is a position a community project should be in.
Our domain expired last month. Is it gone?
Probably not yet. Most endings allow a grace period of around thirty days during which an ordinary renewal still restores it. After that comes redemption, which costs several times the renewal, and then an open auction. Act today rather than at the next committee meeting.
Does the certificate cost anything once the name points here?
Entirely, on every plan. The certificate is issued as soon as the name points here and reissues itself well before it lapses. On encryption it matches any paid DV certificate — the paid options exist for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most community sites never need.
Keep reading
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Charity and nonprofit rates with nothing essential stripped out, name and certificate included.
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Hold your own name.
Registration and hosting in one client area, year one of the name included on annual plans, and a renewal figure that does not move.
View Charity Hosting plans