Who owns your domain names and website hosting?

Initially websites were simply shop windows and we handed the design, build and hosting across to design and marketing agencies. When we needed changes we called them back in. Now, of course, our websites are a critical central hub of all stakeholder communications and we cannot run effective businesses without them.

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So if business websites are so important why do so many businesses not own their own domain name and hosting?

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As a small digital agency, we spend quite some considerable time under the bonnet of our client sites updating, redesigning and modernising. In doing so we often find that the domain name and/or hosting is registered and sometimes owned by their previous agency, developer or even “some bloke who used to live in Reddish who built the first incarnation of our website”.

Please check and make sure you own your domain name and the hosting account for your website.

If you don’t know, ask your colleagues or the person in charge of your IT and make sure you find out the account owners and passwords for your domain name and hosting accounts – they may not be the same account, in fact, often aren’t. You can also use the search tool at whois.com to give you an indication of what the names are of the companies involved.

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When designing and building WordPress websites we help our clients gain ownership of their website. We don’t tie clients into long term contracts and they stay with us because we work effectively with them not because we have any ownership on their website and can hold a gun to their heads.

We make sure our clients own their sites and in addition our client websites are designed and built using the latest user-friendly Gutenberg editor which really does allow you to take back control of your content.

With ownership you have the freedom to change the team working on your site with ease and well-designed websites allow you to manage content yourself with ease.