Your domain name might not actually be yours
A website is three separate pieces, and they can have three different owners. The two minute test that tells you whether your domain is in your name.
It is a conversation we have several times a year, and it always arrives in the same order. Someone wants to rebuild their site, or simply fix an opening time. The person who built it has stopped answering, left the island, or wants a fee to hand things over. And that is the moment, never before, when they discover the site's address is not in their name.
Nobody asks the question when they sign. It costs nothing, and it saves you two years of being stuck.
Who actually owns your website?
A website is not one object. It is three separate things: the domain name, the content and code, and the hosting. Each one can belong to somebody other than you, and nothing on the screen shows it. The only piece that is genuinely irreplaceable is the domain name.
It is what sits on your cards, on your sign, in your Google listing, and in the links other sites have pointed at you over the years. Hosting can be swapped in an afternoon. An address cannot: it takes your search visibility, your email and your reputation with it.
The two minute test
Open lookup.icann.org and type your domain name. The Registrant line shows the declared holder. If you read an agency's name there, you do not own your own address.
Many registrars now hide that information for data protection reasons, so you may only see a generic placeholder. In that case, two questions do the same job. Have you personally ever received a renewal email for this domain? And do you have a login for the account where it is registered? If the answer is no to both, someone else is holding your domain.
The three pieces, and who should hold what
The domain name. In your name, with your email address and your card. It is the cheapest piece of the whole setup, around fifteen dollars a year for a .com, and by far the most critical. It also carries your mail: lose the domain and you lose your professional email address and every account tied to it.
The content and the code. Your photos, your copy, your listings. Always keep the originals on your own drive, outside the website. For the code, the question is format: a site built on a proprietary platform usually cannot be exported, or comes out in a shape nothing else can read. That is not dishonest, it is simply how those tools work, but you want to know it beforehand rather than afterwards.
The hosting. The most replaceable piece, and the one people worry about most by mistake. If you hold the domain and a copy of the site, moving host is a day's work.
"I pay a monthly fee, it is all included"
A subscription is not a trap in itself. It can pay for real work: updates, backups, fixes, somebody who answers on a Sunday when the booking form breaks.
The only question that matters is this one: if I stop paying tomorrow, what is left? If the answer is "nothing", you are not buying a website, you are renting one. At $80 a month, five years comes to $4,800, and at the end of it you still own nothing.
That is a defensible choice if you make it knowingly. We took the other route, with published prices paid once, and we stand behind it page by page on our web agency in St Barts, where the monthly subscription model is the most common on the island.
What to ask before you sign
Four questions, for any provider including us. An honest professional answers each one in a single line, without hedging.
Will the domain name be registered in my name, with my email address? If I stop tomorrow, what stays online? Can I take the code and the photos, and in what format? Who receives the renewal notices?
Keep the answers in writing. An email is enough, and it is worth more than a contract nobody will ever reread.
If the domain is not in your name
It is not lost. Domain names transfer: you ask the current holder for the authorisation code, they unlock the domain, and your new registrar completes it in a few days. Most of the time, asking is enough.
If you are refused, registrar dispute procedures exist, but they are slow. The fallback is buying a neighbouring address and redirecting, which costs you dearly in search visibility and confuses your customers. As for the site itself, if it was built on a closed platform, it gets rebuilt rather than recovered.
Which is why the test is worth running now, while it is only a curiosity, rather than on the day you urgently need to change something.
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