“Do I own my website?” sounds like a simple yes-or-no question. In practice it’s three or four separate things, and it’s entirely possible to think you own your site while a designer or agency actually controls the parts that matter. Here’s what ownership actually breaks down into, and where the traps are.
The domain name
Your domain (the yourbusiness.co.nz part) is registered through a domain registrar and renewed yearly. The person or account that registered it is the one who controls it — full stop. Some agencies register your domain under their own account “to make it easier,” which sounds harmless until you want to leave and discover you need their permission to transfer it out.
Ask directly: is the domain registered in my name, under my own account, with my email as the contact? If it’s registered under the agency’s account, ask for it to be transferred to yours — this should be a five-minute job, not a negotiation.
The hosting
Hosting is where your website’s files actually live and get served from. Some designers host your site on infrastructure they control and bill you monthly for it — reasonable, as long as you know that’s the arrangement and what happens if you want to move. Others build on a platform (Squarespace, Wix, a proprietary CMS) where the hosting and the platform are the same thing, and leaving means rebuilding from scratch elsewhere.
Neither setup is wrong on its own. The trap is not knowing which one you’re in until you try to leave.
The source files and content
This is the one people assume is automatic and sometimes isn’t. If your site is custom-built, do you have access to the actual code — or does it only exist on the developer’s machine and their hosting account? If it’s on a CMS, do you have your own login with full admin access, or does the designer log in on your behalf whenever something needs changing?
A reasonable standard: you should be able to get a full copy of your site’s files and content on request, and you should have your own login credentials — not ones that route through someone else.
What “lock-in” actually looks like
Lock-in rarely looks dramatic. It’s usually one of these, discovered months or years later:
- The domain is registered under the agency’s account, and transferring it takes weeks of back-and-forth
- The site only runs on the agency’s specific hosting setup, so moving means a rebuild, not a migration
- You don’t have admin access to your own CMS, so every text change goes through them and their invoice
- The “custom” platform is actually proprietary software the agency built, meaning no other developer can touch it
None of these mean the agency is acting in bad faith — plenty of these arrangements exist for convenience, not control. But you want to know which one you’re in before you sign, not after you’ve decided to leave.
What to ask before you start
Three questions cover most of it: Will the domain be registered in my name? Will I have my own login with full access? If I want to move to another developer in future, what would that actually involve? A studio with nothing to hide will answer all three plainly and quickly.
The honest trade-off
Some businesses genuinely prefer a managed arrangement — pay monthly, never think about hosting or updates, call someone when something breaks. That’s a legitimate choice, not a trap, as long as you’ve chosen it knowingly rather than discovered it by accident. The problem was never being managed. It’s being managed without knowing that’s what you agreed to.