Ownership
Who actually owns your website?
If the person who built your site disappeared tomorrow, could you still get to it? Most small businesses in West Alabama do not know the answer, and find out at the worst possible moment.
A website is really three things stacked on top of each other: a domain name (the address people type), hosting (the computer the files sit on), and the files themselves. You can own all three, some of them, or none of them, and the person who set it up may not have made that clear.
Here is how to check, in about ten minutes.
1. The domain
Go to lookup.icann.org and type in your web address. It will tell you the registrar — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google, whoever — and roughly when it expires. Now ask yourself: do you have a login for that registrar? If you do not, you do not control your address. Someone else can point it anywhere, or simply let it lapse.
2. The hosting
Do you have a login for wherever the site actually lives? If you have never seen a bill for hosting and never seen a login screen, someone else is paying for it and someone else can turn it off.
3. The files
Ask for a copy. A real website is a folder of files. If the person who built it can email you a zip of that folder, you are fine. If the answer is that the site only exists inside a platform and cannot be exported, you are renting, not owning — which is a legitimate choice, but you should be making it on purpose.
What good looks like
- The domain is registered in your name, with your email as the contact.
- You have the registrar and hosting logins written down somewhere you can find them.
- You have a copy of the site files.
- Auto-renew is on for the domain, on a card that is not expired.
None of this is about distrust. The person who built your site probably has no interest in holding it hostage. But people move, businesses close, and nephews go to college. Ownership is not a relationship question. It is a paperwork question, and paperwork outlives goodwill.
If you check and find you are missing one of the three, that is fixable, usually in an afternoon. The hard version is finding out during the week your domain has already expired.