The domain, the hosting, the analytics and the ad accounts should all be registered to your business with you holding the logins. Check today. Sorting it out while you are happy takes twenty minutes; sorting it out while you are leaving takes weeks and sometimes fails.
We find this broken constantly. A domain registered to a web designer who stopped trading. An ad account owned by an agency, so the entire history goes when the relationship does. Hosting on somebody's personal account with a card that expired. None of it is malice, mostly. It is what happens when nobody asked at the start.
The domain is the one that matters most
Everything else is replaceable. Your domain is your identity, your email and every link anyone has ever made to you. Lose control of it and you are starting again.
Look up your own domain in a public WHOIS lookup. If the registrant is a privacy service, that is normal, and you need to log into the registrar to confirm the account is yours. If you cannot log in, that is the finding, and today is the day to fix it.
What about hosting?
Less consequential and still worth owning. If your site is hosted under an agency's account you cannot move without their cooperation, and you cannot get a copy of the files if they stop answering.
A managed arrangement where the agency handles hosting is perfectly reasonable, ours included. What makes it reasonable is a written answer to one question: if we part company, do I get the files and the database. If the answer is anything other than yes, that is not hosting, it is a hostage situation.
Not sure who owns yours?
Send us your domain. We will look up what is public, tell you what to check privately, and what to do if the answer is wrong.
Get a free website and marketing auditAnalytics and ad accounts
Both should be owned by the business with the agency granted access, not the other way around. This is easy to set up correctly and almost impossible to unwind later, because the history does not transfer.
The ad account is the painful one. Years of conversion history is what makes an account perform, and starting a fresh account means starting that learning again. We have inherited clients who lost three years of history because the previous account belonged to an agency, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
| Asset | Who should own it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | The business | It is your identity, your email and every link to you |
| Hosting | The business, or a written right to the files | You cannot move without it |
| Analytics | The business | History does not transfer between accounts |
| Ad account | The business | Years of conversion history is lost if you start again |
| Content and photos | The business, in writing | Photography licenses can be narrower than you think |
What about the content?
The words and the photographs on your site should be yours, in writing. Most agreements say so and plenty say nothing, and silence is not ownership.
Ask specifically about photography, because a photographer's license can be limited to one use and that limit passes to you without anyone mentioning it. If you are paying for photographs of your own business, get the terms in writing.
What about the email addresses?
Worth checking at the same time, because business email usually runs on the domain and inherits whatever mess the domain is in.
The failure we see most is a business running on a free personal address while the domain sits unused, which makes every quote look less credible than it should and means the business does not control its own correspondence. The other failure is email hosted inside somebody else's account, so that leaving an agency means losing years of history. Both are fixable in an afternoon while things are calm and neither is fixable quickly when they are not.
What we do, and why we say it out loud
Everything we build is registered to the client. The domain is theirs, the analytics is theirs, the ad account is theirs, and if we part ways they leave with the site and the data. We say this in the first meeting because it removes a fear that most business owners are carrying from a previous experience and are too polite to raise.
It also makes us more replaceable, which is the point. An agency that keeps a client through control rather than through results is not a business we want to run.
The twenty minute audit
Log into your domain registrar. Log into your hosting. Log into your analytics. Log into your ad account. If you cannot log into any one of them, that is your afternoon sorted, and it is worth doing before you need it rather than during a change you did not plan.
Write the four logins down somewhere your business would still have access to if you were not available. That last part sounds morbid and it is the reason a lot of small businesses lose their domain: one person had everything and nobody else knew where.
How we set this up on a build is on the Growth Engine page, what an ongoing arrangement includes is on the pricing page, and if you want us to check who currently owns yours, ask us and we will look it up.