Create a company to manage my personal domain name

Question

I own a domain name that has the format last-name.com, that is used primarily for personalised email addresses for my family. At the moment, I am the legal owner of the domain name and the subscription to the email service is in my name.

The problem: if I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, the other members of my family would most likely not be able to get access to my accounts and would lose their email service and potentially the domain name.

The question: I was thinking of creating a company where every member of my family would be a shareholder, transfer the domain name to that company, and bill every shareholder monthly/annually for their share of the costs of running the email service. The company in question would not have as an objective to generate profit, it would just serve as a legal guarantee that my family would retain ownership of the domain name in the case I was hit by a bus.

Is it legal to create and use a company in the way described above ? Is this the most simple solution from the legal point of view ?

Jurisdiction: UK/EU

Answer 1

You seem to have a fundamental (though not uncommon) misunderstanding of how companies and shares work.

A company has its own finances. When a company purchases something it doesn't have a whip-round from its shareholders- it uses company money.

You certainly could create a company to manage the domain name and charge the family to use it, along with all the paperwork and costs that entails. The company would pay for the domain name.

This would accomplish absolutely nothing. In the bus scenario the company would be passed according to your will (or to your next of kin) and you would have the same problem. If nobody knows the password, nobody can access it.