Here’s a question most business owners can’t answer straight away: do you actually own your website?
Not the design. Not whether you paid for it — you almost certainly did. I mean the domain name, the hosting, and the accounts those things live in. Because paying for something and controlling it turn out to be different things, and plenty of people only discover the gap at the worst possible moment.
Let me say the important part first, because this topic gets written up as a horror story and it shouldn’t be: in most cases nobody did anything wrong. Someone built a site years ago, set everything up under their own accounts because that was the fastest way to get it done, and the handover conversation just never happened. No malice, no scheme. It only becomes a problem later, when that person moves on, retires, gets busy, or you simply want to make a change and can’t.
So this isn’t about distrusting whoever built your site. It’s about making sure you’re not accidentally locked out of your own business.
The three things, which people tend to blur together
When someone says “my website,” they’re usually talking about one thing. It’s actually three, and they can each live in a different place under a different person’s name.
The domain name — yourbusiness.com. This is registered with a registrar: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and so on. Whoever’s account it sits in controls it. This is the one that matters most, and I’ll come back to it.
The hosting — the server where your site’s files actually live. Movable, but only if you can get in.
The website itself — the design, the pages, the content. On a builder like Squarespace or Wix it’s bound to that platform account. On WordPress it’s a set of files you can export, if you have access.
And running underneath all three: the accounts and logins. That’s really the whole question. Not “who made this,” but “whose email address gets the password reset.”
Why the domain is the one to care about
If you take one thing from this, take this: own your domain name.
Your domain is your address. Everything else can be rebuilt, moved, or replaced — a new host, a new site, a new developer — but only if you control the domain. Lose it and you’re not just rebuilding a website, you’re changing your business’s address and telling every customer who has your old one.
There’s a second reason that catches people out. Your email almost certainly runs on the same domain. If your address is you@yourbusiness.com, that works because of DNS settings on the domain. Whoever controls the domain can, deliberately or by simply letting it lapse, take down your email along with your website. For most businesses that’s considerably worse than the site going dark.
Domains also expire. A domain that quietly lapses because the renewal notice went to an email address nobody checks anymore can be bought by someone else within days, and getting it back ranges from expensive to impossible.
Three checks, free, about ten minutes
None of this requires hiring anyone, including me.
1. Find out where your domain is registered — and whether you can log in.
Look your domain up at ICANN’s lookup tool, which is the neutral one rather than a registrar trying to sell you something. It’ll tell you which registrar holds it and when it expires.
One honest caveat, because a lot of advice on this skips it: it probably won’t tell you who owns it. Privacy rules mean registrant names and contact details are redacted on most domains now. So WHOIS tells you where your domain lives, not whose account it’s in.
Which means the real test is simpler and more reliable: go to that registrar’s website and try to log in. If you can get in and see your domain, good. If you’ve never had an account there, that’s your answer.
2. Check you can get into your hosting and your site.
Same test. Can you log in yourself, today, without asking anyone? Is the account under your email address or someone else’s?
3. Ask yourself the honest question.
If you and your current web person parted ways tomorrow — amicably, no drama, they just moved on — could you still get into everything?
If the answer is “I’d have to ask them,” that’s the thing to fix. Not because they’d refuse. Because you shouldn’t need to ask.
What good looks like
You own the domain, in a registrar account under your email, with auto-renew switched on and a payment method you control. You can log into your hosting and your site. Your web person is a user on those accounts, not the owner of them.
That arrangement gives you everything: someone competent managing it day to day, and no scenario where you’re stuck. Having someone manage it for you is completely fine. Having someone own it instead of you is the part worth fixing.
And if you run those three checks and everything’s already in your name — you’re in good shape. Genuinely. Nothing to do, and that’s a perfectly good outcome for ten minutes of your time.
“But my web person handles all that”
Fair, and for day-to-day work that’s a sensible arrangement. The question isn’t whether you trust them. It’s what happens if they retire, get ill, get overwhelmed, put their prices up, or you decide you’d like to try someone else.
A good web person hands you the keys without being asked, and won’t mind in the slightest if you check. If asking “can I make sure the domain’s in my name?” would cause friction, that itself is worth knowing.
If you find a gap
Don’t panic, and don’t assume bad faith. The usual fix is a friendly email: “I’d like to make sure the domain and hosting are in my name — can you help me move them across?” Most of the time that’s all it takes, and a decent developer will sort it out the same week.
If they’re unresponsive, or things are genuinely tangled, domains and hosting can usually still be recovered — it’s a known problem with known procedures, just a tedious one.
This connects to something I wrote about in the hidden costs of ‘easy’ website builders: the “can you leave?” question. Ownership is the same question asked earlier. It’s much cheaper to confirm you have the keys now than to go looking for them when you urgently need them.
The honest bottom line
Go and do the three checks. They’re free, they take about ten minutes, and the most likely outcome is that you discover everything’s fine and you can stop thinking about it.
If there’s a gap, it’s fixable — usually easily, and often without paying anybody.
If you check and find a mess — a domain in a former developer’s account, no logins, nobody answering — that’s the kind of untangling I help with. But do the checks first. The goal here is that you own your own business online, not that you swap one person holding the keys for another.
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