Who owns your website? The five questions to ask before you pay a deposit
How to check that your domain, hosting and code will be registered in your name — and the exact questions that stop a web designer holding your site hostage.
You own your website only if the domain, the hosting account and the code are registered in your name — not your designer’s. That is worth stating plainly because it is the single most common way UK small businesses lose their sites: the designer registers the domain under their own account “to keep things simple”, the relationship sours or the designer disappears, and the business discovers it cannot log in to anything it thought it had paid for. Domain registrars will only deal with the named registrant, so if that name is not yours, the site is effectively rented. Before you pay any deposit, ask who the domain registrant will be, who holds the hosting account, whether you get the source code, what happens if you part ways, and what is documented for the next developer. A designer with good answers will give them in writing without hesitation; a designer who bristles at the questions has answered them anyway.
The five questions, and what a good answer sounds like
1. “Whose name will the domain be registered in?” The only good answer is yours: your registrar account, your email address on the registrant record, the designer added as a delegate if they need access. UK business forums carry years of threads from owners whose “old webmaster registered the domain in his name, not ours” — and the registrar, quite correctly, would not help them, because the registrar’s customer was the webmaster.
2. “Who holds the hosting account?” Same answer. Hosting under the designer’s account means your site’s continued existence depends on their invoice history, their business continuing to exist, and their goodwill. One UK hosting firm reports taking three to four calls a week from businesses whose site is down and whose designer cannot be found.
3. “Do I get the code?” For a custom build, you should receive the source — ideally a git repository you control — not just access to a proprietary builder. “You can edit it through our platform” means the site lives only as long as your subscription does.
4. “What happens if we fall out?” You should keep everything, because everything was yours all along. If the honest answer involves an exit fee, a transfer process, or “we’d work something out”, the ownership is not real.
5. “What does the next developer get?” A written handover — where things are hosted, how the site builds, what the accounts are — means you are never locked to the person who built it. This is the question that separates designers planning to earn your renewal from designers relying on it.
Why designers do it the other way
Rarely malice; usually convenience plus a business model. Registering everything under the agency account is genuinely simpler for them, and it makes leaving genuinely harder for you — which quietly converts a one-off project into a lifetime customer. The large website-subscription providers state it openly in their terms: cancel, and the site you paid to have built does not come with you. None of this is illegal. All of it is avoidable by asking the five questions before money moves, and by walking away from anyone who will not put the answers in writing.
How Point28 handles it
Every account — domain, hosting, analytics — is created in your name from day one, the code is handed over as a git repository you control, and the handover documentation is part of the fixed scope, not an extra. Our own answer to question four is published on the pricing page: if we fall out, you keep the lot.