Do you own your website? Six questions to ask before you hire anyone

The most expensive website problem we get called about is almost never a design problem. It is a business that wants to move, or refresh, or just get a small change made, and discovers that the person who built the site five years ago owns the domain, holds the hosting, and is not answering email.

This is rarely malice. It is usually convenience that hardened into a trap: it was faster for the developer to register everything under their own account, and nobody wrote down what would happen later.

Ownership is four separate things

People say "my website" like it is one object. It is four, and you can own some and not others.

• •The domain name. Your address. Whoever is listed as registrant controls it, and if that is not you, you do not control where your customers land.
• •The hosting. The machine serving the files. Held in someone else's account means access ends when the relationship does.
• •The code and design. The actual site. Some contracts license it to you rather than transfer it, which matters the day you want someone else to work on it.
• •The content. Your words, your photos, your customer list, your reviews. Getting these back should never require anyone's cooperation.

The six questions

Ask these before money changes hands. Any of them being answered vaguely is itself the answer.

• •Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be your business, with you on the account, even if they manage it for you.
• •If I leave, what exactly do I take? You want a concrete list: domain, code, content, assets.
• •Is the code mine outright, or licensed while I pay? "Licensed" is not automatically bad, but you need to know.
• •Can another developer work on this? A site built on a proprietary system only its author can touch is a subscription with extra steps.
• •What happens if you go out of business? Good answer: you already have everything. Bad answer: silence.
• •How do I get a copy of everything, today? If the answer takes more than a week, ownership is theoretical.

The proprietary platform trap

A specific version worth naming: some agencies build on a system only they can operate, then charge monthly for hosting and edits. The site works, the service can be perfectly good, and the price can be fair. But there is no version of the future where you take that site elsewhere. You are not buying a website, you are renting one, and the two get quoted as though they are the same thing.

Again, this is a legitimate business model as long as it is disclosed. The problem is that it usually is not, and the word "own" gets used anyway.

Where we stand on this

Since we are asking you to interrogate everyone else, here are our answers to our own six questions. Your domain is registered to you. The site is yours outright, code included, at handover. Hosting is $0 a month and stays free whether or not you keep us on a plan. Any developer can work on it, because it is a standard React build and not a private system. If we vanished tomorrow you would still have the domain, the code, and a running site.

The monthly plan we do sell, Build and Care, buys updates, monitoring, and support. It does not buy your site back from us, because it was never ours.

If you are mid-way through this and realising you cannot answer question one about your current site, tell us what you are dealing with. Untangling a site from a previous developer is a normal thing we do, and it is usually less dramatic than it feels.