What you actually own when someone builds your website
There is a question almost no small business owner can answer, and it is not a technical one. If the person who built your website stopped answering the phone tomorrow, would you still have a website?
Most owners assume yes. They paid for it, so they own it. It does not work like that, and the gap between what people think they bought and what they actually bought is where the expensive surprises live.
This is not about blame. Plenty of honest designers set things up in their own accounts because it is faster, and they never intend to hold anything hostage. It becomes a problem when they move on, change careers, get ill, or simply stop replying. Here is what you need to own, how to check each one today, and what it costs to fix if the answer is bad.
A website is four separate things, and they can have four different owners
People say "my website" as if it is one object. It is four, and they are bought separately, billed separately and often held by different people.
1. The domain name
The address itself, yourbusiness.com. You rent it, yearly, from a company called a registrar. Names like GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Squarespace Domains. This is the one that matters most, because it is the only one you cannot rebuild. Your printed cards, your Google listing, your email addresses and every link anyone has ever shared all point at it.
2. The hosting
The computer your website sits on, rented monthly or yearly. If your site was built on Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, hosting is included in your monthly fee and there is no separate account. If it was built on WordPress, it is almost certainly a separate company and a separate bill.
3. The website itself
The design, the pages, the code, the photos. On Wix or Squarespace, this lives inside one account and cannot be moved out. On WordPress, it is files and a database that can be copied, if you can reach them.
4. The accounts hanging off it
Your Google Business Profile, your Google Analytics, your email, your online booking, your payment processor. These get set up during a build and then forgotten. They are also the ones most likely to still be in someone else's name.
How to check each one, today, without asking anyone
None of this needs your designer and none of it costs anything. Fifteen minutes.
Check the domain
Search for "ICANN lookup" and use ICANN's own lookup tool. Type in your web address. You want to see your name or your business name in the registrant field, and an email address you can actually open.
If privacy protection is switched on, the details are hidden. That is normal and it is not automatically bad. It means you now have to check a different way: go to the registrar's website and try to log in with your own email address, using forgot password. If you get a reset email, the account is yours. If nothing arrives, the domain is in somebody else's account.
Check the hosting
Find the bill. Go through your card statements and your email for the last year and look for a recurring charge to a hosting or website company. If you cannot find a single charge anywhere, somebody else is paying for it, which means somebody else controls it.
Check the website itself
Try to log in and change something small. The address is usually your site address followed by /wp-admin for WordPress, or the platform's normal login page for Wix, Squarespace or Shopify. You are looking for two things: that you can get in at all, and that your account is the owner rather than a contributor or an editor. Those are different, and only one of them can remove other people.
Check the accounts
Go to Google Business Profile and try to claim your own business. If it says the listing is already managed, you are told who by, in a masked form that is usually enough to recognize. Do the same with any booking or payment tool on the site.
What a bad answer costs
Real numbers, because the whole point is knowing what is at stake.
If someone else holds your domain
You can ask for it to be transferred to you, and most designers hand it over without an argument. If they do not, or you cannot reach them, your realistic options are to negotiate, or to buy a different address and lose everything pointing at the old one.
Two rules are worth knowing before you start, because both catch people out:
- You cannot move a domain to a different company for 60 days after the registrant name, organization or email is changed. So the moment your designer updates the details to yours, a 60 day clock starts before it can be moved to your own account. That is ICANN policy and no company can waive it.
- The same 60 day lock applies after any transfer between companies.
Plan for the handover to take a couple of months. It is not somebody stalling you.
If a domain expires while nobody is watching
This is the one that turns a small problem into an expensive one, and it has its own guide: what happens when your domain name expires. The short version is that there is a window where you can still renew at the normal price, then a window where it costs about five times as much, then it is gone and anybody can buy it. If your expiry date has already passed, read that page rather than this one.
If someone else holds the hosting or the site
This one is recoverable. It costs money and a few weeks, but the site can be rebuilt on hosting you control. Annoying, not fatal. Which is exactly why the domain is the one to check first.
Five things to put in writing before you pay anyone again
Copy these into an email. You do not need a contract or a lawyer, and you do not need to explain why you are asking.
- 1.The domain is registered in my name and my business name, in an account I can log into, and the renewal is billed to my card.
- 2.I get owner or administrator access to the website, not editor access, on the day it goes live.
- 3.Hosting is in an account in my name with the bill on my card, or, if you are hosting it for me, say so plainly and tell me what happens to my site if we stop working together.
- 4.Every account created for my business belongs to my business, including the Google Business Profile, analytics and anything taking bookings or payments.
- 5.On the last day, I get a list of every account, what it is for, and how to log in.
Any decent designer will say yes to all five without blinking, because they already work this way. The reaction to the email tells you a lot.
The thing to do this week
Check the domain. Just the domain.
It is fifteen minutes, it is the one thing you cannot rebuild, and the most common bad outcome in this whole article is not a designer holding your site to ransom. It is a renewal notice going to an email nobody reads any more, and a business finding out its website is gone when a customer mentions it.
Set a calendar reminder for two weeks before your domain expires, every year. That single reminder prevents the most expensive thing on this page.