Your domain and hosting
Two separate things keep your website online, and they renew separately. Here is what each one is, whose card it sits on, and what happens if one of them lapses.
The two things
Your domain is your address: the
yourname.org.nz people type in. You rent it a year at a
time. Nobody else can use it while it is yours, and it stays yours as
long as it keeps being renewed.
Your hosting is the space the site lives in and the service that hands your pages to visitors. That is Webflow, the platform we built your site on, and it is also billed yearly.
They are two different companies, two different accounts and two different renewal dates. One can lapse while the other is perfectly healthy, which is why a site can go offline in a week where nothing appeared to change.
| What | Where it lives | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Your domain | Cloudflare, in an account in your organisation’s name | About US$16 a year for a .co.nz or .org.nz, charged at cost |
| Your hosting | Webflow, billed to you through our workspace | Depends on your plan. It is on your Webflow invoice |
Cloudflare sells domains at what they cost them, with nothing added on top, which is why we put client domains there. If your domain sits with another provider, or your site was built somewhere other than Webflow, the names change but the shape of this page still holds. Email us and we will tell you exactly where yours lives.
Who pays for what
While we are building, we usually carry both on our accounts so you are not paying for a site that is not live yet. At handover we move the billing to you.
That is on purpose. Your domain is one of the few genuinely irreplaceable things your organisation owns online, and it should sit in an account with your name on it, paid by your card. If we ever part ways, nothing of yours is stuck on our side.
We keep our admin access so we can help, publish and fix things. You keep ownership.
Setting up your domain (Cloudflare)
We send you an invitation to your own Cloudflare account. Accepting it makes you an admin of the account that holds your domain.
- Open the Cloudflare invitation email and click Accept invitation.
- If you do not already have a Cloudflare account, you will be asked to create one. Use the email address the invitation was sent to.
- You may be asked to verify your email. Once you have, go back to the invitation email and click Accept invitation again to finish joining.
- Click your profile icon in the top right, then Billing.
- Open the Payment tab and add a card and billing address.
- In the left-hand menu, open Domains, then Registrations.
- Switch Auto-renew on for every domain listed.
Adding a card does not charge you anything now. Cloudflare only uses it when a renewal actually falls due, and you can see what is coming up at any time under Billing or Domain registration.
Auto-renew is the whole point of the exercise. With a card on file and auto-renew on, the domain looks after itself every year and none of the rest of this page ever needs reading again.
Setting up your hosting (Webflow)
Webflow hosting is handed over the same way. We send a client billing invitation from our workspace, you accept it and add a card, and the hosting for your site bills to you from then on. The site itself stays exactly where it is.
Yearly billing is cheaper than monthly and means one renewal to think about instead of twelve.
If a renewal is missed
A missed domain renewal does not take your site down straight away. The domain goes into a grace period of roughly a month, during which everything looks normal and it can be renewed as usual. After that you can lose the name, and a lost name can be registered by anyone. This is the one worth acting on quickly.
A failed hosting payment is more sudden. The site goes offline and visitors see an error page. Nothing is deleted. Once the payment goes through we republish the site and it comes back as it was.
When the person who set this up leaves
This is the single most common way things come unstuck, and it is the easiest to prevent. Where you can, do it before their last day.
- Add their replacement, or whoever is covering, to the Cloudflare account and to Webflow.
- Check the card on file is the organisation’s, not a personal one that is about to be cancelled.
- Check the billing and notification email is a shared address that somebody still reads.
- Remove the person who is leaving.
If they have already gone and nobody knows what was set up or where, email us. We can see what exists on our side, tell you what is missing, and send fresh invitations to whoever is picking it up.
Common snags
- You log in to Cloudflare and your domain is not there. Almost always one of two things: the invitation has not been accepted yet, or you are signed in to a different account from the one it was sent to. Sign out, then open the invitation email again and accept from there.
- The invitation has expired or you cannot find it. Email us and we will send a fresh one. They do time out.
- You have paid but the site is still down. Webflow needs the site republished after a lapse. Tell us the payment has gone through and we will publish it.
- You are not sure whether it is the domain or the hosting. You do not need to work that out. Send us the web address and what you are seeing.
Still stuck
Email [email protected]. Tell us your web address and roughly what is happening, and we will look it up from our end. We would much rather answer this than have a domain quietly expire.
Editing your site once it is online is a different job. That one is on Editing your website.