There are two ways to have a website, and most owners do not know which one they have until the day they try to leave.
Owning means the domain name, the hosting account and the files are yours. You can move them, sell them, hand them to someone else, or do nothing at all with them for a year.
Renting means you pay monthly for access to something somebody else holds. Stop paying and it stops being there.
Both are legitimate. The problem is that renting is rarely described as renting, and the difference only becomes visible at the worst moment.
The three things you either own or you don’t
People talk about “the website” as one object. It is three, and they can be owned separately.
The domain name. Your address — the thing on your van and your business cards. It is rented from a registrar, typically $15–20 a year, but the question is whose name is on the registration. If it is registered to the person who built your site rather than to you, they control your address.
The hosting. The computer the site runs on. The account can be in your name or theirs.
The files. The actual pages. Yours to take, or not.
It is common to own one or two of these and not the third. The domain is the one that bites: you can rebuild pages, but a domain registered to someone else, pointed at a site you no longer control, with your reviews and your printed material all referencing it, is a genuinely bad position.
How to find out which you have
Four questions, and you can answer most of them yourself in ten minutes.
1. Who is the domain registered to? Look up your domain in any public WHOIS lookup. Many registrations are privacy-protected, which hides the name — in that case, ask directly: “Is the domain registered in my business’s name, and can I log in to the registrar account?” The ability to log in is the real test.
2. Can you log in to the hosting? Not “can you ask someone to make a change”. Can you get in.
3. What happens if you stop paying? Ask it plainly: “If I cancel next month, what do I still have?” With a genuine ownership arrangement the answer is “everything, you just stop getting help”. With a rental it is “the site comes down”.
4. Can you take the files and go? A site you own can be moved to a new host in an afternoon.
What “your website” costs when it is rented
The monthly figure usually looks reasonable. It is the arithmetic over time that surprises people — and the fact that at the end of it, there is nothing to show.
Published builder plans run roughly $17–39 a month. A monthly agency plan is usually more. Pay either for several years and you will have spent more than a one-time build costs, with the difference that the rental has produced no asset. Stop, and you are back where you started, except your address may now belong to someone else.
That is not an argument that renting is wrong. If the monthly fee buys real ongoing work — new pages, campaigns, someone actually doing something each month — it may be money well spent. The question is whether it is buying work or merely buying continued access to something you already paid to have built.
The sentence that matters in a contract
Most web contracts are short and most people skim them. One clause is worth reading properly: whatever says who holds the intellectual property, the domain registration and the hosting account.
Phrases to look for:
- “Licence to use” — that is renting, whatever the rest of it says.
- “The agency shall maintain the domain registration” — ask for it in your name instead.
- “All materials remain the property of…” — read the end of that sentence carefully.
What you want, roughly: the domain registered to your business, the hosting account in your name, and the files yours on completion. You can ask for all three. Plenty of builders will agree without blinking, which tells you something about the ones who will not.
If you are already renting
You are not stuck, but move in the right order.
Get the domain first. It is the hardest to replace and the easiest to transfer. Ask for it to be moved into an account in your business’s name. Do this even if you are staying — it costs nothing and it changes who is in control.
Then take copies. Your text, your photos, your reviews. The words are yours whoever typed them.
Then move the site. This is the easy part, and it is only easy once the first two are done.
What we do, so you can compare
On our own builds: the domain is registered in your name, the hosting account is yours, and the site is yours when it is finished. There is no monthly fee to us, because there is nothing you need to keep renting.
That is not the same as no ongoing cost, and anyone who tells you a website is free afterwards is hiding a number. Yours is about $21–27 a month: $9–15 for hosting, about $10 for the widget that keeps your Google reviews live on the page, and roughly $15–20 a year for the domain. The difference is who holds the accounts and what happens if you stop paying us — which is nothing, because all three are already yours. If you want changes later we will quote for them, and if you want someone else to make them, that works too.
Say no to us and nothing here changes. Ask the four questions above of whoever you do hire — the answers tell you most of what you need to know about who you are dealing with.
