Most owners can tell you their rent, their payroll date and their best customer. Ask three questions about the technology under the business and the room goes quiet. Who holds your domain? Where does your email live? When did someone last restore a backup?

None of these needs a technical answer. Each has a plain one. If you cannot give it in a sentence, that is the finding. Here is how to get the answer, and what a good one sounds like.

Question one: who holds your domain

Your domain is the name people type to reach you. It carries your website and your email. If it lapses or is taken, both stop at once.

A good answer names the registrar, the account it sits in, the email address that account uses, and the renewal date. "GoDaddy, in an account under info@ourcompany.com, renews in March, auto-renew on, with a card that does not expire first."

A bad answer names a person. "Our old web guy set it up." If the account belongs to someone who has left, you do not hold the domain. You are renting it from their inbox.

What to do this week:

  • Look up the domain at a WHOIS service and note the registrar and expiry date.
  • Find the login. If nobody can, start the recovery with the registrar now, not the week it expires.
  • Move the account to a company address, turn on two-step sign-in and transfer lock, and put the renewal on a company card.

Question two: where does your email live

Email is the front door of the business and the recovery address for nearly every other account you own. You should be able to say which platform runs it, who the administrator is, and what happens to a mailbox when someone leaves.

A good answer: "Google Workspace, ALCO administers it, leavers are signed out the same day and their mail is forwarded for ninety days." Or the same sentence with Microsoft 365. Both are fine. Not knowing is not fine.

Two follow-ups matter. First, are SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up and enforced? Those are the three records that stop a stranger sending mail as you and keep your own mail out of spam. Second, do you have a backup of mailboxes that is separate from the platform? Deleted means deleted unless someone has planned for it.

If your email sits with the hosting company that built your website years ago, read your answer to question one again. It is probably the same person.

Question three: when did someone last restore a backup

Notice the word. Not "do we have backups." Restore. A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a plan.

A good answer has a date and a result. "We restored a file from last Tuesday in about ten minutes." "We restored the whole site to a test server in September and it came up clean." The date proves someone did it. The time tells you how long you would be down.

Ask three more things:

  • Where are the backups kept? If they sit on the same server as the live system, one failure takes both.
  • How far back do they go? A problem found on Friday might have started on Monday.
  • Who gets the call? A backup is a step in a recovery, and recovery is a job with a name on it.

Why these three

Domain, email and backups are the three things that cannot be rebuilt from scratch in an afternoon. A website can be redesigned. A laptop can be replaced. A lost domain, a locked-out mailbox or a backup that never existed can end a quarter.

They are also the three things most often left with a former employee, a former vendor or a card that expired. Nobody meant it. The business grew and the setup did not.

Write the answers down

Put the three answers on one page: registrar and renewal date, email platform and administrator, backup location and last restore date. Keep it where the owner and one other person can find it. Review it once a year, on a date you will remember.

If you are an ALCO client, the answers already exist. Open a request in myALCO at https://alcohq.com/myalco and ask for your one-page summary. We will send it, and we will fix anything on it that is not right.

If you are not, this is a good first conversation to have with us. Book a call at https://alcohq.com/book and bring the three questions. We will help you answer them in a sentence each.

ALCO. Always online.