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Hosting by industry

Web Hosting for Insurance Agencies

Most agencies are running a website their carrier gave them, on a domain the carrier registered, and they find out what that means on the day they change appointment. Everything else on this page, web hosting for insurance agencies included, is downstream of that one fact.

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Who owns your domain

This is the only question on this page that can cost you the business, so it goes first. Open your domain registration and look at the registrant name and the administrative email address. If the registrant is a carrier, a marketing programme, a field office, or a web company you stopped working with in 2014, you do not own your website address. You are borrowing it.

Borrowing works fine right up until it does not. The relationship ends, the renewal is missed, the person whose personal email is on the record retires, and the address on fifteen years of business cards stops resolving. Nothing about your policies changes. Everything about how people find you does.

What you are actually protecting

The local search position you built slowly, which does not transfer to a new address.
Every review, directory listing, and referral link that points at the old domain.
Your email. If staff addresses run on that domain, losing it takes the mailboxes with it.
Printed material. Cards, folders, vehicle lettering, the sign on the building.

The fix is unglamorous and cheap. Put the domain in the agency's legal name, with an agency email on the record that more than one person can read, and set it to renew automatically. Our domain expiration page covers what happens if that lapses, and transferring a domain explains how to move a registration you do not currently control.

If you cannot tell who the registrant is because the record is private, that is normal and not a problem by itself. Domain privacy hides the details from the public, not from you. Log in and check. If you cannot log in, that is the problem.

Find out whose name your domain is in

Send us your agency's web address and we will read the registration for you, tell you whether the carrier or a former designer is on the record, and what it takes to put it back in the agency's name.

Check my domain Ask us first 716-771-2536

Carrier-supplied sites are convenient, and they are not yours

Carriers and franchise programmes hand out websites because it is good for them. The site is on brand, the compliance language is pre-approved, and it costs you little or nothing. For a new agent with no time and no budget, taking it is a defensible decision.

Understand what you are accepting. The pages live on their platform, under their control, edited through their tool. You usually cannot export the content. You often cannot see the traffic data. And the site exists because of the appointment, so when the appointment ends, so does the site.

The version that hurts most is the hybrid. The agency runs its own real website, and the carrier programme also publishes an agent page with a similar name. Clients find whichever one Google prefers, which is frequently the carrier's. Then the agency drops that carrier and half its inbound traffic goes with it, and nobody can say exactly how much because the analytics were never theirs.

A workable compromise

Keep the carrier page. It is free reach and there is no reason to refuse it.
Own a separate domain, in the agency name, that is the address you print and say out loud.
Put your real content on your own site: who you are, what lines you write, the towns you cover, how to reach a human.
Link from the carrier page to yours where the programme allows it.

That way a change of appointment costs you a page, not a presence. If you inherited a site nobody can log into, taking over a website walks through the recovery order.

How to find out where you actually stand

Half an hour, once, and you will know whether you have a problem. Do it before you need to know.

Find the registrar

Not the web designer, not the host. The registrar is the company the domain is registered with. If nobody at the agency knows, that is your answer and the rest of this list is urgent.
Read the registrant and the admin email

The registrant should be the agency's legal entity. The admin email should be an address the agency controls today, ideally a shared one like admin@ rather than a producer's personal account.
Confirm auto-renew and a valid card

Expired cards are how good agencies lose good domains. Check the expiry date on both the domain and the payment method.
Locate the hosting separately

The domain and the website are two different things, explained on domain name versus web hosting. You can own one and not the other, and plenty of agencies do.
Write it all down

Registrar, host, email provider, who has the logins. One page, in the same place you keep your E and O certificate. This is the document that saves you a fortnight when the person who set it up is unreachable.

If step one stalls, do not panic and do not start registering a new domain. There is usually a documented path to recovering a registration through the registrar, and it is worth exhausting that before giving up an address people already know.

Quote forms collect more than owners realise

Look at the form on your own site with fresh eyes. A typical agency quote request asks for a date of birth, a home address, a vehicle identification number, driver licence details, prior carrier and claims history. That is a serious amount of personal data arriving from a public web page, and most agencies have never asked where it goes.

In a lot of cases it is emailed in plain text to whichever mailbox the form was pointed at years ago, then it sits in that mailbox forever. Nobody chose that. It is just what the default did.

The basics worth getting right

The page must be served over HTTPS. That is what an SSL certificate does, and there is no version of this where it is optional.
Send submissions to an agency mailbox on your own domain, not to a personal address. Our business email page covers the difference.
Ask for the minimum you need to start a conversation. You do not need a licence number to make a first call.
Decide how long submissions are kept and where, then actually delete them on that schedule.
Keep whatever software runs the form updated. An out of date form plugin is one of the more common ways a small site gets compromised, which is the subject of website security.

Insurance sits under state regulation and, depending on the lines you write, potentially health information rules as well. Describe your practice to your own compliance contact or attorney rather than relying on a hosting page for it. What we can say plainly is that a form collecting this material should not be running over an unencrypted connection into somebody's personal inbox.

None of this needs an expensive plan. It needs the form pointed somewhere sensible and the certificate in place.

Off the carrier site without losing your email

We move agency sites off carrier platforms in the order that keeps mail flowing, with the quote form landing in a mailbox you own. If the setup you have is already fine, we will say so.

Move My Site to AldoMedia Ask us first 716-771-2536

Independent versus captive, and how each should present

These are two different websites doing two different jobs, and copying the wrong model is a quiet waste of money.

A captive agent is selling one carrier's product, and the carrier is doing the brand work. Your site's job is to be the local face: your name, your office, your staff, your town, and a fast route to a phone call. It can be small. It should be fast. It does not need a quoting engine, because the carrier already has one.

An independent agency is selling judgement. The whole argument is that you compare across carriers, and the site has to make that concrete. That means real pages for the lines you actually write, plain descriptions of who you serve, and named people rather than stock photographs. It is a bigger site, and it earns the extra pages.

What neither of them needs

A live rating engine embedded in the homepage. Most agencies who buy one find it produces junk leads and a slow page.
A blog updated once in 2019. An empty news section signals a dormant business.
A carousel of five slides. Nobody reads slide two.
A separate microsite per line of business. One site with good pages beats five thin ones.

Both fit comfortably on shared hosting. An agency site is text, a few photographs and a form. It is one of the lighter things you can put on a server, and traffic in this trade is steady rather than spiky.

How much web hosting for insurance agencies you need

If you are a registered investment advisor, or you hold securities licences and your website discusses investments rather than insurance, this is not your page. That work sits under a different rulebook, with recordkeeping and advertising review obligations that change how a site is built and archived. Read hosting for financial advisors instead. The short version of the difference: this page is about owning your domain and handling quote data sensibly, that one is about what a regulator expects to be able to review later. If you do both, assume the stricter set applies and ask your compliance officer, not us.

For everyone else, the honest answer is that the entry level is usually enough.

You do not need a large plan for a site that is a dozen pages and a contact form.
You do not need extra storage. Agency websites are measured in megabytes.
You do not need managed hosting if your site is not running WordPress or any other software that needs patching.
You probably do need to spend a little on the domain being registered properly, which is a one-off piece of admin rather than a subscription.

Where spending more is genuinely justified: you run several offices or brands on one site, your site carries a client portal or document upload, you run WordPress and want somebody else handling updates, or you have a real archiving obligation. Number of policies in force is not a reason. Neither is the size of your book.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and untangling who owns an agency's domain is familiar work. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and if the plan you are already on is the right one we will tell you that instead of selling you a bigger one.

If you are moving away from a carrier-supplied site, the order of operations that keeps your email working through the change is on the website migration page, and DNS management explains the records that route it. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your agency site runs on and we will look at current pricing with you.

Common questions

Insurance agency website questions

My carrier gave me a website. Do I still need my own?

Yes, and the reason is what happens when the appointment ends. A carrier site is on their platform, under their control, and it usually disappears with the relationship. Keep it, because it is free reach, but own a separate domain in the agency's name and put your real content there. That way a change of carrier costs you a page rather than your whole presence.

How do I find out whether my agency actually owns its domain?

Log in to the registrar and read the registrant name and administrative email on the record. The registrant should be your agency's legal entity, and the admin address should be a mailbox someone at the agency can open today. If it lists a carrier, a former web designer, or a producer who left, you do not control it. Privacy on the record is fine and normal, since it hides the details from the public rather than from you.

Is it safe to collect dates of birth and driver licence details through a quote form?

It can be, but only if the basics are in place. The page has to be served over HTTPS, submissions should go to an agency mailbox on your own domain rather than someone's personal account, and you should have decided how long you keep them. Ask for the minimum you need to start a conversation instead of the full application. Insurance is state regulated and some lines touch health information, so check your specific practice with your own compliance contact or attorney.

Do I need a live rating or quoting engine on my site?

Most agencies do not, and the ones who buy one often regret the lead quality and the page speed. A captive agent already has the carrier's quoting path. An independent agency is usually better served by clear pages about the lines you write and a fast route to a phone call, because the argument you are making is about judgement rather than a number on a screen.

I switched carriers and my old website is gone. Can I get anything back?

Sometimes. Start with the domain, because that is the piece worth fighting for. Registrars have a documented process for recovering a registration and it is worth exhausting before you register a new address and lose the search position and printed material tied to the old one. The page content itself is often recoverable from search engine caches or archive services, though rebuilding it usually goes faster than salvaging it.

Does an agency website need a big hosting plan?

Rarely. An agency site is text, a handful of photographs and a form, which is one of the lighter things you can put on a server, and traffic in this trade is steady rather than spiky. Entry level shared hosting covers most single office agencies. Spending more makes sense if you run several offices or brands on one site, carry a client portal or document uploads, or want someone else handling WordPress updates.

Transfer a Domain

Moving a registration into the agency's own name, including one you do not currently control.

How a transfer works

Taking Over a Website

What to do when the site exists but nobody at the agency has the logins.

Read the recovery steps

Business Email

Why quote requests should land in a mailbox on your own domain, and what that takes.

Read about business email

Every trade we cover is listed on hosting by industry.

Hero image: Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.

Find out who owns your domain

Send us your agency's web address and we will tell you where the domain is registered, who is on the record, and whether the plan you are paying for is the right one.