Who owns your website? The question that almost always gets asked too late

Your website is yours only if three things are true at the same time: the domain is registered in your name, you control the DNS, and your email is in an account you own. If any of the three lives in your provider's account, it isn't yours — even if you paid for it in full.

A company called us because they wanted to change a few things on their site. A small job.

When we looked at where each piece lived, something else came up. The domain was registered in the account of the agency that had built the website. So was the hosting. So was the email configuration. So were the sending credentials.

The company owned none of it. They had a website, yes, but they had no way to touch it without asking permission from a third party they barely spoke to anymore.

And it hadn't been done in bad faith. That's how things get set up by default when nobody thinks about it: it's faster for the provider to create everything under their own user and take care of it.

What it means in practice

When your infrastructure is in someone else's account, three things stop being yours.

You can't leave. Switching providers stops being a business decision and becomes a negotiation. You need the other party to cooperate, and their incentive to cooperate is exactly zero.

You can't see. How many visits you get, from where, which pages work. All of that exists, but not somewhere you can look at it yourself.

You can't fix things fast. The day the website goes down, or your email stops arriving, your response time is however long it takes someone else to answer a message.

None of the three feels like a problem until the day you need it. And that day always comes at the worst possible moment.

We almost did it again ourselves

Here's the part that taught us the most, and it doesn't make us look good.

Having untangled exactly that dependency, months later we had to set up a couple of measurement tools for that same company. The natural, comfortable, fast thing was to create them under our account and transfer them later.

That's how we proposed it. And as we wrote it down, we realized it was the same setup we had come in to undo, just with better intentions.

"We'll transfer it later" is an honest sentence when you say it. The problem is that transferring some platforms is slow, others have mandatory waiting periods of days, and on all of them it's a chore that gets put off because it's never urgent.

Getting it right the first time costs nothing. Fixing it later does.

The rule we adopted

It's short:

Every account is created in the client's name. We come in as invited users, and we can be removed with one click.

Domain, hosting, email, analytics, Google profile. Everything. The client is the owner from minute one, and we are guests with permission.

It has a consequence we like to say out loud: if someday we're no longer useful to you, you leave without having to ask us for anything. No awkward conversation, no migration, nothing to rescue.

A provider who needs to keep you by holding your keys is already telling you something about what they think of their own work.

Three questions for your case

Answer them now; it takes two minutes:

• Can you, yourself, log in today to where your domain is registered? Not "I know who has it." Log in.
• If you fall out with your current provider tomorrow, what do you take with you? If the answer includes "I'd have to ask them to...", you already know where you stand.
• In whose name is the account where your website lives? Not who manages it: whose name it's in.

If any of them gave you doubts, it doesn't mean someone is doing something wrong to you. Most of the time it's convenience, not bad intent. But it's yours, and it should be in your name.

How to fix it

It can almost always be done, and it's almost never as hard as it seems.

Domains are transferred between registrars with a code your provider is required to give you. The big platforms have a procedure for changing ownership. Hosting is migrated by copying files and pointing the domain to the new place.

What's usually missing isn't the technical path: it's someone sitting down to take inventory of what exists and where it is. That inventory is half the work, and it's the first thing we do when we take over an inherited project.

Do you know where your website is?

If you're not sure what's in your name and what isn't, we'll find out. We put together the inventory and tell you what's worth moving, in what order, and what risk each step carries.

The diagnosis is free. We'll be in touch soon.