Who actually owns your website and domain?

Look it up directly. ICANN's registration data lookup at lookup.icann.org shows the registrar and registration data for domains like .com, and CIRA's WHOIS tool does the same for .ca. Privacy services can mask the listed name, so the decisive test is simpler: can you personally log in to the registrar account the domain lives in?

If the answer is no, you do not control your domain, whatever your invoices say. The account holder controls renewal, transfer, and DNS, which means they control whether your website and the email addresses on that domain work at all.

Check this today, not the week you decide to leave a provider. Transfers are far easier while the relationship is still friendly, and so is fixing an honest mistake.

Remember that your domain is also your email. If the address on your invoices stops working because a renewal lapsed in someone else's account, you have lost more than a website; every customer and supplier conversation in flight goes quiet with it. Domain control is business continuity, not a technicality.

Hosting is the second lever of control. If your site lives inside your provider's hosting account, you cannot move it, copy it, or repair it without their cooperation, and if they disappear or stop answering, the site goes with them.

Three questions settle it: where is the site hosted, can I get a full copy of it on request, and who holds the backups? You are not asking to self-host. You are asking whether your business can survive this provider having a bad year.

A provider hosting your site is normal and usually sensible. A provider who cannot or will not hand over a copy of your own content is something else.

Backups deserve one more sentence. Ask how often they happen and whether you can receive a copy on request, because a provider's backup that you cannot reach is a promise, not a backup. Once a year, ask for an export and file it away. Ten minutes of admin, and the backup is finally something you hold.

By default, creative work belongs to whoever made it unless a contract assigns it. If an agency wrote your copy and shot your photos and nothing in writing says otherwise, you may effectively be licensing your own about page.

The fix is one plain clause: content and media produced for you become yours on payment. Reasonable providers agree to this without a fight, because they were not planning to hold your headline hostage anyway. The ones who push back are telling you something useful.

Some things stay yours either way: photos you took, reviews customers wrote, and the logo you brought predate the provider. The grey zone is what was made for the site, the page copy, the graphics, the design itself, and that is exactly the zone the assignment clause exists to close.

The table above is the short version: whose name is on the domain, can you log in yourself, what happens when you leave, and what leaving costs. Ask all four before money moves, and get the answers in writing, even if writing just means an email.

None of these questions is rude. Every good provider has heard them and has clean answers ready. The awkward silence only happens when the business model depends on you never asking.

If you are reading this after signing, do not panic and do not go quiet. Most ownership traps are default sloppiness rather than strategy. Ask for the transfer politely, in writing, and escalate only if the answer is a stall or a surprise fee.

One habit worth stealing from bigger companies: keep a one-page record of where everything lives, the registrar, the host, the DNS, and who has logins. When something breaks at 9 pm before a long weekend, that page is the difference between a fix and a weekend offline.

Since we sell websites, here is our own answer to the table: the domain is registered in your name, there is no exit fee, and your content is yours. If you leave, you keep the domain and everything on the site.

That is how the builds actually run, not just the policy page version: Jason Henry Hunt's domain sits in his own registrar account, in his name, while we handle everything around it.

We put that here because it is the standard we think you should hold any provider to, including us. Ownership is not a premium feature.

If your domain sits in a registrar account you can log into, you can get a copy of your site on request, and your agreement says the content is yours, your ownership is in good shape and there is nothing to buy here. This guide is the checklist, and you just passed it. Send it to a friend whose agency answers these questions slowly.