The Week a Business Lost Its Own Website, and Could Not Get It Back
By Yemi Ogundairo on
The short answer to who owns your website is whoever the domain, the hosting account and the code are registered to, and all three should be in your business's name with you holding the logins. If they are not, you do not own your website, whatever the invoice says, and the day your developer stops replying is the day you find out. Checking takes about ten minutes and the instructions are below.
It is a question that almost never comes up while things are going well. It comes up on a Tuesday, when nobody has answered your messages for three weeks and the site has gone down.
The three things you actually own, or do not
A website is not one thing. It is three, and they can each sit with a different person.
The domain
Your address, the gr8qm.com part. It is rented yearly from a registrar, and whoever is named as the registrant controls it. This is the one that matters most, because a domain you do not control can be pointed anywhere, sold, or simply left to expire.
The hosting
The machine your site runs on, also rented. If the hosting account is in your developer's name and paid on their card, you cannot move, back up or restore your own site.
The code and the content
The files, the design and the words. Ownership here is set by your contract, and if nobody wrote a contract it is genuinely unclear, which is a worse position than most business owners assume.
You can own all three, one, or none, and most people who have never checked own fewer than they think.
How to check who owns your website, in ten minutes
Look up your domain first. Search for a WHOIS lookup, enter your address, and read the registrant. If it shows your business name, good. If it shows your developer, their agency, or a privacy service you did not ask for, that is the finding.
Then try to log in. Not "do I have the password written down somewhere", but actually log in, today, to the domain registrar and the hosting control panel. An account you cannot open is an account you do not have.
Then ask where the code lives, and get an answer with a name in it. GitHub, GitLab, a zip file on a laptop. If the answer is vague, treat that as a no.
Three checks, one afternoon, and you will know exactly where you stand.
The Tuesday this is written for
Here is how it usually goes, and this is a composite of several versions of the same afternoon rather than one business.
A restaurant owner in Lekki pays a developer she found through a friend. The site is good. She is pleased. Two years pass, the developer moves abroad and the messages get slower, then stop.
Then the site goes down mid-December, in the fortnight she takes a third of her year's bookings. She has no logins, because she never needed them. She finds her domain is registered to the developer's personal email, and the hosting is on his card, which has now expired. Her menu, her photos, her reviews, her Google ranking, all sitting on a machine nobody is paying for.
She did nothing wrong except never ask a question nobody told her to ask.
Getting it back, in order of how well it usually goes
If you can reach your developer, ask for a transfer rather than access. A domain transfer moves the registration into your own registrar account, so it cannot be undone later. Access can be revoked. Transfer cannot.
If you cannot reach them, go to the registrar directly. Registrars have a dispute process, and a business that can produce invoices, a matching trading name and the original correspondence often recovers a domain. It is slow and it is not certain, which is exactly why the ten minute check beats it.
If the domain is genuinely gone, buying a new one and rebuilding is sometimes faster than fighting. Painful, but you keep your business name and you take the search ranking hit once rather than staying hostage.
What to ask for on the next project, before you pay anything
Ask for the domain to be registered in your business name, with your email as the registrant, on day one. A developer who resists this is telling you something.
Ask for the hosting account to be yours, paid on your card. Your developer can have access to it. It should not belong to them.
Ask, in writing, that the code and design become yours on final payment. One sentence in an email is enough to change the answer from unclear to yours.
Ask for a handover at the end: every login, in writing, and a copy of the files. The best time to get this is the day you make the final payment, because that is the last moment everyone is still motivated.
None of this is aggressive and none of it insults anybody. It is the same paperwork you would expect when buying a vehicle, and any professional will have done it before.
The uncomfortable bit
Plenty of developers hold domains not out of malice but out of habit, because setting it up under their own account was faster on the day. The outcome is the same either way. It is your business's address and it should be in your name.
If you want a second pair of eyes on where yours currently sits, the contact page reaches us, and we will tell you what we find whether or not there is any work in it for us. When we build something, the domain and hosting go in the client's name from the first day, and the handover is part of the job rather than a favour.