Websites
Who Owns Your Website
Domain, DNS, hosting, code, content and analytics are six separate things, and plenty of businesses own two of them without realising it.
The question sounds simple and almost never gets a simple answer. "Our website" is at least six separate assets, each held in a different account, and a business can easily own just two of them.
It tends to come up at the worst moment. The developer stops answering email, the relationship ends badly, or the person who set it all up retires and nobody has the logins.
The six things
| Asset | What it is | Who often holds it |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | The registration of yourbusiness.com | Whoever bought it, often a contractor |
| DNS | What points the domain at the server | Registrar, host, or a third service |
| Hosting | The server the files live on | Agency reseller account |
| The code | Theme, templates, custom work | Agency, sometimes under licence |
| Content | Text, photos, the database | Usually you, inside their system |
| Analytics and ads | GA4, Search Console, Google Ads | Agency, very often |
The domain is the one that matters most
You can rebuild everything else. Rebuilding won’t get a domain back. If it’s registered to somebody else’s account, they can point your business name anywhere they like, and your only recourse is a lawyer.
You can check in two minutes. Look up your domain with a WHOIS search, and the registrant organisation should be your business name. If privacy protection hides it, log into the registrar directly. If you can’t log into the registrar, you have your answer.
If you can’t log into your domain registrar right now, someone else controls your domain.
Analytics and ads accounts, the second trap
This one is harder to spot and more common. The agency creates a Google Ads account and a GA4 property under its own management. When you leave, the data stays with them: the conversion history, the negative keyword list, and the years of analytics you’d need for any comparison.
Here’s how it should be set up. The business owns the Google Ads account, the GA4 property, the Search Console property and the Google Business Profile, and the agency gets admin access. Day to day it works the same, and leaving becomes a permissions change with nothing lost.
It’s one reason we read the analytics setup off an existing site during an audit and keep it running. Continuous measurement is worth more than a clean slate, because a new property resets every year-over-year comparison in the account to zero.
Hosting, and the reseller markup
Many agencies resell hosting, putting clients on one account they hold. It’s convenient and it’s fine, as long as you can leave. Ask two questions. Can I get a full backup of the files and database on request? Can the site be moved to a host I choose?
If the answers are vague, plan around that. If hosting is bundled into a monthly fee with no line item, ask what share of the fee it is. Reselling $8 hosting inside a $250 monthly plan is a legal business model, and you should still know it’s happening.
The code, and the word "proprietary"
Some agencies build on a proprietary platform. The site works, and it lives only on their system with no export, so leaving means rebuilding from zero. They don’t tend to advertise this.
Ask them directly what you walk away with if you part ways. A WordPress site with a standard theme is portable. A site built in a closed builder is a rental, and the honest agencies say so.
The five-minute inventory
- Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain. Is your business the registrant?
- Log into your registrar. Can you?
- Log into your host. Can you download a backup?
- Open Google Ads and GA4. Are you an owner, or just a viewer?
- Check who owns your Google Business Profile. A former marketing vendor holding it is very common.
What it should look like
The domain sits in your account, paid on your card. Hosting is in your name or portable on request, and the code can be exported. You own analytics, Search Console, ads and the Business Profile, and whoever does the work gets access. All of it is documented somewhere outside one person’s head.
That’s the arrangement on every website we build, and we write it into the handover. It also makes us easy to leave, and we set it up that way on purpose.