Who owns your website?

The owner of a domain is whoever is recorded with the registry as the registrant. That is not necessarily whoever paid the invoice, and not whoever registered it on your behalf. If the provider is listed as the registrant, the domain is legally theirs, even if you have been paying for it for years.

For .si domains you can check this yourself at register.si, which offers a public WHOIS lookup. What you see depends on who the registrant is:

• If the registrant is a legal entity (a company, sole trader, institute or association), the registrant's name is publicly visible. Check that it matches your company.
• If the registrant is a natural person, the registry publicly discloses only the contact email address. Check that the address is yours.

For other extensions (.com, .eu, .net) the same information is held by the registrar the domain runs through, or in the public WHOIS for that extension.

If you are not the registrant, it is not necessarily misconduct: it is often a shortcut taken when the site was set up and never corrected. A change of registrant is handled by the registrar, usually with both parties' consent. Ask for it while the relationship is still good.

Copyright in a design and in code arises with the author, meaning whoever created the work. It does not pass to the client automatically on payment: a transfer, or permission to use the work, has to be agreed and written down. If the quote or contract says nothing about it, the extent of your rights is a matter of interpretation, which is a poor starting point for a conversation that usually begins once a dispute is already under way.

Two things need separating. Work created for you (the build, the design, the adaptations) is what you agree terms on. Third-party components (the content management system, a theme, plugins, fonts) carry their own licences and those stay as they are. Some licences are tied to the client, others to the provider and do not transfer.

The question worth asking before you sign: what exactly may I do with the code and the design once the project ends, and what is licensed in a way that will stop working if I change provider?

Copy you wrote yourself, and photographs you took or commissioned, are yours. Three things complicate it:

• Copy written by the provider. The same applies as to code: rights transfer by agreement, not by paying an invoice.
• Stock photographs. The licence is often tied to whoever bought it, and to a single website. Before a migration or a redesign, check whether the photograph can come with you.
• Logo and brand marks. If the logo was created as part of the project, put the transfer of rights in writing separately, because you will use it for far longer than the website.

Content is also the hardest part of a site to replace. Code can be written again and photographs can be taken again, but years of accumulated copy, descriptions and references cannot.

This is the moment that reveals what you actually had. If the domain is registered to the provider, the hosting runs in their account and you hold no copy of the code, you lose the website along with them. If your email also runs in their account, you lose that too, which is often worse than losing the site.

Three things protect you reliably, and all three have to be arranged in advance rather than at the moment you need them:

• You are recorded as the domain's registrant.
• Hosting access is in your company's name, not inside the provider's shared account.
• You hold a copy of the code and the content as well, not only the provider.

None of the three requires you to distrust your provider. They only require the arrangement to be written down so that it survives the end of the relationship, whichever way it ends.

In practice, moving a site is a handover of access. A complete handover contains the following, and the list is useful as a checklist whoever your provider is:

• Access to the domain at the registrar, or a transfer of the registrant to you.
• Access to the hosting and to the DNS settings.
• The code and site files, in a form that can be deployed elsewhere.
• Administrator access to the content management system.
• The database and media files, if the site uses them.
• Access to email, if it runs on the same domain.
• Access to measurement tools and to SSL certificates, where these are not automatic.
• A list of third-party licences, stating which transfer and which do not.

Hosting is often paid a year in advance. If you move mid-term, most providers do not refund the remainder, so a move is usually cheaper to plan close to renewal. The site itself need not go offline during a migration, provided it is prepared in parallel and DNS is switched only at the end.

If you want to know how this works when an existing site is being rebuilt, we describe the process on our website redesign page.

Everything above applies to any provider. Since it is only fair to say where we stand ourselves, these are the four things we put in every quote:

• The domain is registered to you, from day one.
• Once everything is settled, you receive the rights to the finished site and your content, the code, the domain and all access details.
• The price is fixed and confirmed in writing before we start.
• You can stop the project at any time. We bill only the work done and refund the difference.

If you want to know what that costs, the prices are published on our pricing and packages page.

Is the domain mine if I pay for it?

Not necessarily. The owner is whoever is recorded with the registry as the registrant, and paying the invoice is a separate matter. For a .si domain you can check this in seconds in the public lookup at register.si.

What do I do if my provider is listed as the domain's registrant?

Ask for the registrant to be changed to your company. The registrar the domain runs through handles the process, usually on the basis of both parties' consent. It is easiest to arrange while the relationship is still running.

Does paying automatically give me copyright in the design?

No. A transfer of copyright has to be agreed and written down. If the quote or contract says nothing about it, the extent of your rights is unclear. Ask before you sign, not after.

What should a handover at the end of a project contain?

Access to the domain and the hosting, the code and site files, administrator access to the content management system, the database and media files, access to email if it runs on the same domain, and a list of third-party licences stating which transfer and which do not.