Who Owns Your Website? No, Really — Check.

Here's a question that makes business owners go quiet: if you needed to move your website tomorrow, could you? Not "would it be a hassle" — could you actually log in to your domain registrar, your DNS, and your hosting, right now, with credentials you control?

Most can't. And the discovery usually comes at the worst possible moment: a renewal notice, a designer who's stopped answering, a site that's down and nobody knows where to log in. Hostage infrastructure is the most common mess I inherit, and almost every case started the same way — the owner assumed that because they paid for it, they owned it.

The five accounts that decide whether you're a hostage

Paying the invoice is not the same as holding the keys. There are five separate accounts that determine whether your web presence is yours, and they're often scattered across people who no longer work with you:

The domain registrar. This is the deed to your address on the internet. If it's in your old designer's personal account, your domain is legally theirs to renew, transfer, or let lapse. This is the one that ends businesses.

DNS. The routing layer that points your domain at your site and your email. Control this and you can move anywhere. Lose it and you're stuck no matter who owns the rest.

Hosting. Where the site actually lives. If it's on someone else's credit card and account, your site exists at their discretion.

The Google Business Profile. For a local business this is often more valuable than the website — and agencies love to claim it under their own account, so that leaving them means leaving your reviews and your map presence behind.

Analytics. The history of who visited and what they did. Lose the account and you lose the record.

The ten-minute audit

You don't need me for the first pass. Sit down and, for each of the five, answer one question: is this in an account I control the login to? Not your designer's, not an agency's, not a shared password from years ago — yours. If you can't confidently say yes to all five, you've found the exposure, and you found it while there's still time to fix it calmly instead of during an emergency.

The tell I see most often is the person who says "my web guy handles all that." That's not ownership; that's dependence dressed up as convenience. It's fine right up until the web guy raises his rate, sells his business, retires, or simply stops replying — and then the same convenience becomes the thing holding your business hostage.

Fix it before you need it

If the audit turns up ugly, the move is to reclaim ownership before a renewal date forces your hand, not after. When it's already an emergency — the web guy has vanished and a renewal is bearing down — the recovery is still possible, but it's stressful and time-boxed in a way it didn't have to be. And while you're checking accounts, it's worth confirming your name, address, and phone agree with themselves across the web, because the same neglect that loses logins usually lets the listings drift too.

Do the five-account audit today. It takes ten minutes and it's the cheapest insurance in this whole business. If what you find is a mess, sorting out clean ownership is a concrete, do-able project. Inquire about a project →