Who actually owns your website?
Most business owners have never checked, and plenty discover the answer at the worst possible moment: when they try to leave a provider, or the provider vanishes. A website is not one thing; it is five, and each can have a different owner.
The five parts, and who should own each
| Part | What it is | Who should own it |
|---|---|---|
| The domain | yourbusiness.co.uk itself | You, always, in a registrar account you control. Non-negotiable. |
| Your content | Your words, photographs, logo | You, always. You made it or paid for it. |
| The design and code | How the site looks and works | Depends on the contract; this is the clause to read. Renting can be fair during a build's payback period; renting forever is not. |
| Your enquiry data | Every lead the site ever captured | You. It should be exportable to you at any time. |
| The platform | The provider's hosting, dashboards and tools | The provider; that is genuinely theirs. What matters is that YOUR data inside it comes out with you. |
The rent-versus-own question for monthly websites
Pay-monthly services are a fair model (we run one), but the ownership clause separates good from bad. If the site never becomes yours, every year of trading builds an asset for somebody else. Our answer: during the initial 12 months the site is MyDiro's (that is how a £0-upfront build gets paid for); after that it becomes yours outright, design and code included, with a full export free of charge if you ever move it. Most providers never hand the site over. We do, because we would rather keep clients with a monthly report worth reading than with a lock-in.
Three checks to run today
- Log in to your domain registrar. If you cannot, find out who can. Today.
- Find the ownership clause in your website agreement. If there is not one, ask your provider to put their answer in writing.
- Ask how you would get your site and your enquiry data out if you left. A good provider answers plainly; a pause tells you plenty.
Related: how pay-monthly websites work and what websites really cost.