Who actually owns your website?

A question worth being able to answer without checking: if you fell out with your web company tomorrow, could you take your website with you?

For a lot of small businesses the honest answer is no, and they do not find out until the relationship has already gone bad.

The four things you should own

The domain name. Registered to you or your company, with your email on the account, in a registrar account you can log into. If your developer registered it on their account “to make it easier,” you are renting your own address.

The DNS. Whoever controls DNS controls where your website and your email point. This is the single highest-leverage piece of the whole stack and it is the one owners most often cannot access.

The hosting account. Fine for an agency to manage it. Not fine for you to have no path to it. You should be able to get a full backup of your site without asking anyone’s permission.

An admin login to the site itself. Administrator, not editor. Even if you never use it.

Managed is not the same as locked in

There is a real difference between “we handle this so you don’t have to” and “we handle this so you can’t.”

We manage all of it for our clients, that is the service. But the domain stays in the client’s name, the hosting account belongs to the client, and if someone leaves, they leave with a full export and a clean DNS handoff. Sometimes people go. That is business. It should not cost them their website.

Proprietary page builders are the version of this problem that is easiest to miss. If the site is built on a platform’s closed system, exporting gives you a pile of HTML and no working site. It is one of the reasons we build on WordPress: it is portable, and portable means the relationship stays voluntary.

How to check, in ten minutes

1. Look up your domain in a public WHOIS. See whose name and email are on it.
2. Try logging into your registrar. If you do not know who your registrar is, that is the finding.
3. Ask your web company, in writing, for administrator access to the site and confirmation of who holds the hosting account.
4. Note how long the answer takes and how comfortable it sounds.

A good provider answers that email the same day without getting defensive. It is a completely normal thing for an owner to ask.

If the answers are bad

Do not start a fight before you have leverage. Get a full backup first, files and database, then sort out access, then move if you need to. Doing it in the other order is how sites get held hostage.

We migrate sites onto our hosting for free when someone starts a plan, and a fair amount of that work is untangling exactly this. It is more common than it should be.