Who Actually Owns Your Website?

You should. If your business paid for the website, you should own it. But a website is not one single thing you can hold in your hand. It is three separate parts, and each one is registered or licensed in somebody’s name. Plenty of Australian business owners only discover that those names are not theirs at the worst possible moment, usually when they want to change designers or move host.

The good news is that it takes about fifteen minutes to check, and it is usually fixable.

The three parts of “your website”

• The domain name. Your address, like yourbusiness.com.au. It is registered to a person or entity for a fixed term and renewed.
• The hosting. The server your site actually lives on, plus the account and billing attached to it.
• The site itself. The design, the code, the pages, the photos and the words. In practice this is a folder of files and a database.

You can own all three, some of them, or none of them, and the arrangement is often accidental rather than sinister. A designer registers the domain to get the job moving, resells hosting under their own account, and nobody writes any of it down.

Checking who holds your domain name

This is the one that matters most. Lose the domain and you lose your email, your search rankings and every business card you have ever printed.

For .com.au and .net.au names, the rules are set by auDA and the registrant must have a genuine Australian connection, normally an ABN or ACN. Look up your domain with a WHOIS search and check the registrant name and ABN. If it shows your web designer’s business rather than yours, that needs correcting. For .com and other global names there is no ABN requirement, so the registrant field and the account login are what count.

Two other details worth confirming: the registrant contact email should be an address you control, because that is where renewal and transfer notices go, and you should be able to log in to the registrar account yourself.

Checking your hosting

Hosting is less dramatic, because a site can be moved to a new host without much fuss. Still, you want to know who the host is, whose credit card renews it, and whether you can request a full backup on demand.

Being on a reseller plan under your agency’s account is not a problem in itself. It is a common and often sensible arrangement, particularly when the same team handles updates, security and backups for you. It only becomes a problem when nobody will hand over a copy of your files and database. Ask the question early rather than during a falling out.

Who owns the design, code and content?

Under Australian copyright law, the person who creates something generally owns the copyright in it unless there is an agreement saying otherwise. That means the words, photos and custom code your designer produced may still belong to them by default. A good proposal or contract will spell out that copyright in the finished site transfers to you on final payment.

A few things genuinely cannot be transferred, and that is normal:

• Stock photos, which are licensed for use rather than owned outright.
• Premium plugin and theme licences, which are usually annual and tied to a key. These can often be reissued in your name.
• Fonts, which come with their own licensing terms.

This is one reason we lean towards open, standard custom WordPress themes and plugins rather than locked platforms. If the site is built on ordinary WordPress, any competent developer can pick it up later, whether that is us or somebody else.

What to ask before you sign

Before a new project starts, get plain answers to these:

• Will the domain be registered in my business name and ABN?
• Who holds the hosting account, and can I have a full backup whenever I ask?
• Do I own the copyright in the finished site once I have paid in full?
• Will I have an administrator login to my own site?
• If we part ways, what exactly gets handed over, and how long does that take?

Any studio worth working with will answer all five without hesitating. Ours are set out before we start a WordPress web design project, and the same applies across everything in our services. Skink is part of the Defyn family, so hosting, development and support sit with people you can actually ring.

If someone else holds the keys

Start by asking politely and in writing. Most of the time it is simple disorganisation and the transfer happens within a week. Domains can be moved between registrars with an auth code, hosting can be migrated, and a WordPress site can be exported as files and a database and rebuilt elsewhere.

If the relationship has broken down and nobody is answering, you still have options. Registrars have dispute processes, and a site that is still live can often be reproduced from what is publicly visible plus your own copy or an archive. It is slower and more expensive than doing it properly the first time, which is rather the point of checking now.

Not sure who holds what? Give us a ring on 02 9834 4119 or get in touch and we will help you work out where your domain, hosting and site actually sit, with no obligation to move anything.