You Should Own Your Website
Here's a question most business owners never think to ask: if you cancelled your web provider tomorrow, what would you walk away with?
For a lot of local businesses, the answer is nothing. No files, no code, no design assets. Maybe you'd keep your domain name if you registered it yourself. Maybe not even that.
That's platform lock-in, and it's one of the most common complaints I hear from business owners switching providers. They didn't realize they were renting a website until they tried to leave.
What Ownership Actually Means
Website ownership comes down to four things.
Your domain name. This is your address on the internet. You should be the registrant, meaning your name and email are on the account at whatever registrar holds it (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, etc.). If your provider registered it under their account, you're dependent on them to transfer it.
Your code and design files. If your site was custom built, you should have access to the source code. If it lives on a proprietary platform, the code belongs to the platform, not you. That means a redesign with a new provider starts from zero.
Your content. Every word, image, and video on your site should be exportable. If you wrote it or paid for it, it's yours. But some platforms make exporting difficult on purpose.
Your hosting. You should know where your site is hosted and have the ability to move it. If your provider hosts everything on their own infrastructure with no option to migrate, that's a dependency, not a service.
Why This Matters
Lock-in doesn't feel like a problem until it is. Your provider raises prices and you can't leave without rebuilding from scratch. Communication slows down and you're stuck waiting weeks for a simple update. The site starts underperforming and you discover that the platform it runs on doesn't support the features you need.
At that point, switching providers means paying twice: once for the old site you can't use anymore and again for the new one.
And sometimes it gets worse. I've heard from business owners who tried to leave their provider and were told the website's design is copyrighted by the agency. Want to keep using it? That'll be a "lifetime use license" for $25,000. Otherwise, the site comes down and you start from scratch. That's not an exaggeration. It's a real number from a real conversation. When you don't own the code and the design files, this is the leverage your provider holds.
A 2024 survey by Clutch found that 45% of small businesses spent between $2,500 and $10,000 on a website redesign, and another 30% spent $10,000 to $25,000. For many of them, the biggest obstacle wasn't the new build. It was the cost of extracting themselves from a provider they'd outgrown.
How to Check Your Situation
Ask your current provider these three questions:
- Is my domain registered under my name and email, and can I transfer it if I choose to?
- If I end our agreement, can I take the site files, code, and content with me?
- Can I move my site to a different host without rebuilding it?
If the answer to any of those is no, or if you get a vague response about how "it's complicated," you know where you stand.
A Different Approach
Every site Vistoso Creative builds belongs to the client. The domain is in your name. The code is yours. The content is yours. If you ever decide to move on, you take everything with you. That's not a policy I advertise as a feature. It's just how things should work. Ownership is built into every monthly plan.