Do you actually own your website?

The rental model, plainly

There is a common deal for small businesses. Little or no money upfront, then $99 to $300 a month for "your website, hosting, maintenance and support".

It sounds reasonable. Sometimes it even is. But look at the arithmetic. At $149 a month, three years is $5,364. Five years is $8,940. That is agency money for what is usually a template with your logo on it.

And at the end of it, in a lot of these arrangements, you own nothing. The site was built inside the provider's own system. The domain may be registered under their account. Stop paying and the page goes dark, usually within days. Moving to someone else does not mean moving the site. It means building a new one from scratch and losing whatever search rankings the old address had built up.

That is not fraud. It is a business model, and it is usually disclosed somewhere in the terms. The problem is that nobody reads the terms, and the sales conversation is about the monthly figure rather than what happens on the day you leave.

The three things you have to own

Owning your website means owning three separate things. They are usually held in three different places, and a provider can hand you one while quietly keeping the other two.

The domain name. This is your address, yourbusiness.com. It is registered with a registrar and it has a registrant on record, plus an administrative contact and an account it lives in. If that account is your provider's, they control it. Getting a domain moved out of an uncooperative provider's account is possible but slow, and people have lost months to it. A .com costs about $15 to $25 a year. There is no good reason for it not to be in your name.

The hosting account. This is the server the site sits on. Ownership means the account is in your name, on your card or billed to you, and you hold the login. If your provider hosts hundreds of client sites on one account of theirs, you do not have hosting. You have a tenancy.

The site files and code. The HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images and any content database. Ownership means you can be handed a folder or a repository that contains a working copy of your site, and another developer could put it on a different server and have it work. If the site was built in a proprietary system that only that company runs, this is where you find out that there is nothing to hand over.

Miss any one of the three and you do not own your website. You own the parts they let you keep.

What "portable" actually means

Portable means another competent developer could take what you have and put it somewhere else without rebuilding it.

A static site, or a site on a standard platform like WordPress, is portable. The files move, the database moves, it works.

A site built inside a closed builder is not portable, even when you have paid for it. The design, the layout and the content structure only exist inside that company's software. You can export your text. You cannot export the site.

This matters more than it sounds. Portable means you can sack your provider without punishing yourself. It means competitive quotes for future work rather than whatever your incumbent decides to charge. It means if the company is sold, changes its pricing, or simply stops answering the phone, you are inconvenienced rather than stranded.

Questions to ask your current provider

Send these in an email. Ask for written answers. A good provider will answer all six in a couple of sentences without getting defensive.

Who is listed as the registrant of my domain, and which registrar account is it in?

Can you transfer the domain to an account in my name, and is there a charge for that?

Whose name is the hosting account in, and can I have the login?

Can you send me a complete copy of my site files today?

If I stopped paying you tomorrow, what happens to the website?

Was this built on a standard platform, or in your own system?

Two answers are red flags. "It's in our account for technical reasons" means it is in their account. "You don't need the files, we handle all that" means there may not be files you can use.

If you are told a transfer is possible but there is a fee, ask for the figure in writing. A modest admin charge is fair. A number that looks like a ransom is a signal about the whole relationship.

Where monthly payments are legitimate

To be fair about this: not every monthly bill is a rental trap.

Hosting is a real recurring cost, though for a small static site it is $0 to $5 a month, not $99. Domains renew annually. Software licences, booking systems and email services genuinely bill monthly. A support retainer, where somebody actually does work for you each month, is a service you are choosing to buy.

The test is simple. Ask what the money buys and what happens if it stops. If stopping means "you stop getting new work done", that is a service. If stopping means "your website disappears", that is rent.

How we do it

Storefront Smith charges one time. $500 for a one-page site, $900 for five pages, $1,800 for an online store. No retainer.

The domain is registered in your name, in your account, and we bill it at cost, roughly $15 to $25 a year. Hosting is set up in your name too, and for a small site that is usually $0 to $5 a month. We do not mark either of them up, because marking up a $19 domain would be a strange way to earn a living.

You get the site files. The code is yours. If you want to hand it to a nephew who does web work, or to a different shop entirely, you can, and nothing breaks. We would rather you stayed because the work was good than because leaving was expensive.