Names & DNS · Community Organisations
Web hosting for community groups — The name should belong to the group, not to last year's secretary
Volunteer organisations lose domains for one reason above all others: the registration and its notification email belonged to a person, and that person moved away.
The short answer
Register the domain in the organisation's name, with a role address the committee controls as the contact, and record where it lives in the same place the group keeps its papers. That one arrangement prevents the failure that costs volunteer organisations their websites: a name held personally by a member who has since left, with renewal notices going to an inbox nobody can open.
Registrant fields, the contact address, the transfer lock and auto-renew all sit in the panel beside the hosting here, the name's first year is included when you order hosting annually, and registration and renewal figures are quoted on the same row before you pay.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
NVMe
Storage on every plan
Free
First-year name, annual orders
99.9%
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Flat
Renewals with no step-up
Community organisations rotate. A chair serves three years, a treasurer two, a secretary until somebody else volunteers, and the person who set up the website usually stops being involved long before the website stops mattering.
The website itself is rarely the problem. The domain is, because it has exactly one annual renewal, one notification address, and one set of registrant details, and all three tend to have been filled in by whoever happened to be holding the laptop in 2019.
So this page is deliberately administrative. It is about the four or five facts a committee should write down once, and the two mechanisms that make a handover survivable.
Register in the group's name, with a role address
Put the organisation in the registrant field rather than an individual, and use a role address — something like secretary or committee at your own domain — as the contact. That address is the important one, because whoever can read it can approve a transfer and change the registrant details. Point it at a shared mailbox that more than one officer can open, not at a personal account.
There is an obvious circularity to notice here: if the contact address is at the very domain being renewed, an expiry takes down the inbox that would have warned you. So add a second contact on an outside address as well, and make sure that one is also something the committee holds rather than an individual.
The handover pack
Write one page and keep it with the group's records. It should say which registrar the name sits with, which account and role address controls it, what the registrant details are, the expiry date, whether auto-renew is on, where the hosting is, and who has the login for each.
That is fifteen minutes of work and it is the difference between a new committee inheriting a website and a new committee starting again. Review it at the same meeting each year — the one where the accounts are signed off is a natural fit — because a handover pack that is three officers out of date is no better than no pack at all.
Auto-renew, a card that expires, and the gap between meetings
The classic loss goes like this. Auto-renew is on but the card behind it belonged to a former treasurer and has since expired. Every warning goes to an address nobody reads. The first human sign of trouble is somebody mentioning at a meeting that the website has gone, by which point the name may already be in the redemption window where recovery costs several times an ordinary renewal.
Two defences, both dull. Keep the payment method attached to something the organisation controls rather than a member's personal card, and put the expiry date in the group's calendar with two months of warning so it lands in a meeting rather than in nobody's inbox. If the name is genuinely important, buy several years at once and cut the number of opportunities to fail.
Which ending, and what it signals
The organisation-flavoured endings read as non-commercial and are what people expect for a club, a residents association or a small charity, and both the global and the local versions renew at steady figures rather than spiking after year one. Our table puts registration and renewal on the same row so that is easy to check.
Some endings carry eligibility conditions set by the registry rather than by any registrar — a requirement to be a particular kind of organisation, or to have a local address. Those are checked at registration and cannot be waived, so confirm the requirement before a committee votes on a name. Where the condition cannot be met, a plain ending with a well-written about page does the same job.
What a committee actually needs
The registration in the organisation's name, a contact address the committee holds, auto-renew on a payment method the organisation controls, and one page of notes that survives a change of officers.
All of it sits in the panel next to the hosting here, so the next secretary has one login to inherit rather than four, and support answers every hour of every day if the notes turn out to be incomplete.
- Registration in the organisation's name, not a member's
- A role address as the contact, readable by more than one officer
- Auto-renew as a toggle, on the same screen as the expiry date
- Both figures on the row before the committee votes
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
A registration the group holds
Registrant fields and the contact address are edited in the panel, so the name belongs to the organisation rather than to whoever set it up.
The first year of the name included
Order hosting annually and the name's first year comes with it, which is a helpful line to put in front of a committee approving a budget.
Renewals with no step-up
Hosting renews at the rate you first ordered at, and the domain's renewal figure was on screen next to the registration figure before you paid.
Auto-renew you can point at
A toggle beside the expiry date with invoices in the client area, so a new treasurer can see in one screen whether the name is safe.
A site volunteers can run
The site builder is drag and drop and WordPress installs in one click, so keeping the page current does not require a technical member.
Mail at the organisation's name
Role mailboxes come with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP, which is how a committee stops using personal addresses.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Register it to the organisation
Organisation in the registrant field, a role address the committee controls as the contact, and a second contact on an outside address the group also holds. Both figures are on screen before you order.
- 2
Build something a volunteer can maintain
The site builder or one-click WordPress, five or six pages, and one role mailbox per function. Our engineers will move an existing site across free if there is one.
- 3
Write the page of notes, then diarise the date
Record the registrar, the account, the registrant details, the expiry date and the logins. Switch auto-renew on against a payment method the organisation controls, and put the renewal in the group's calendar.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Contact details and locks changed in the panel beside the hosting
- Auto-renew switched on or off from the panel, your call
- The name's first year included when you order hosting annually
- Registration and renewal figures shown on the same row
- Hosting renewals billed at the rate you first ordered at
- Mailboxes at the name you hold, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
Whose name should the domain be registered in?
The organisation's, with a role address the committee controls as the contact — not a member's personal name or inbox. Those two fields are what decide who can approve a transfer or change the details, so a name registered personally is a name that leaves when that person does. Add a second contact on an outside address the group also holds, since an expiry takes down any mailbox at the domain itself.
Our treasurer has left and the renewal notices go to them. What now?
Change the contact address on the registration to a role inbox the committee can open, and change the payment method to something the organisation controls rather than a personal card. Both are edits in the panel. Be aware that changing registrant details usually starts a sixty-day registry hold on transferring the name elsewhere — it keeps working throughout, but a registrar move waits for that clock.
The domain has expired. Can we get it back?
Sometimes, and it gets dearer the longer it runs. During the grace period a renewal at the ordinary figure usually restores it. After that comes a redemption window where recovery costs several times a renewal. Past that the name can go to an open auction and anybody may take it. Act the moment you notice, and afterwards fix the cause rather than only the symptom.
Should we use an organisation ending or a plain one?
Either reads properly for a club or association, and both the global and local organisation endings renew at steady figures rather than jumping after the first year. Check whether the one you want carries an eligibility condition — some registries require a particular kind of organisation or a local address, and that is checked at registration rather than negotiated. If the condition cannot be met, a plain ending with a clear about page does the job.
Keep reading
Web Hosting — Arranged for Community Groups
A plan behind the committee's site, with the record table in the same panel.
WordPress Hosting
WordPress installed for you, on a name the committee holds in its own right.
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A straightforward running order for a migration your visitors never spot: which files travel first, how to bring the mail across without dropping a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two errors that sit behind almost every outage we get called in to fix.
Register it to the group.
Organisation in the registrant field, a role address as contact, and auto-renew on a payment method the committee controls.
View Web Hosting — Arranged for Community Groups plans