You probably do not own your website

Here is a situation I have watched play out more than once.

A business gets a website built. It works, everyone is happy, the invoice is paid. Two or three years later they want to make a change, or move to someone new, or the original developer stops replying to email. And they discover that the domain is registered to the developer, the hosting account is in the developer's name with the developer's card attached, and nobody at the business has ever seen a login.

At that point you are not a customer with a problem. You are a hostage with a polite one.

What "ownership" actually consists of

It is four things, and they are separable. You can own some and not others without realising it.

The domain name. The registrar account where yourbusiness.com.sg lives. This is the one that matters most, because it is your address. Everything else can be rebuilt; the domain cannot be recreated if someone else holds it.

The hosting. Wherever the site actually runs. Vercel, Netlify, a cPanel account, AWS. If the billing card on it is not yours, the site disappears when that card expires, and that is not hypothetical. It is one of the more common ways small business sites go dark.

The code. The repository. If your site is a custom build and you do not have the code, nobody else can work on it. They would have to start again.

The accounts around it. Analytics, the email service that sends your contact form, any CMS, any payment processor. Less catastrophic individually, annoying collectively.

How to check, in ten minutes

Domain: run a WHOIS lookup on your domain, or log into whichever registrar you think you use. If you cannot log in, that is your answer. Singapore .sg domains are administered through SGNIC and their accredited registrars; the registrant contact is the field to look at.

Hosting: can you log into wherever the site is deployed and see the project? If you have never had a login, you do not have access.

Code: ask your developer for the repository URL and check you have access as an owner, not a guest.

Billing: whose card is being charged? If you are not receiving invoices for hosting, someone else is paying, which means someone else can stop.

If all four come back clean, good. Genuinely, that is worth knowing. If any come back the other way, it is fixable, and it is far easier to fix while the relationship is still friendly.

How to fix it without a fight

Most developers are not holding your accounts hostage deliberately. They set things up under their own account because it was faster during the build and then never migrated it. Ask, and most will transfer without complaint.

Ask for these specifically:

1. Transfer the domain to a registrar account in your business's name
2. Transfer or recreate the hosting project under your account, with your billing
3. Transfer ownership of the code repository
4. A written list of every third-party service the site depends on, with what each one does

If you get resistance on any of these, that itself is information.

What good practice looks like

On my own client work, accounts are set up in the client's name from the start where possible, and transferred at handover where it is not. The project lives in the client's organisation, not mine. When a client's site is finished, they can walk away and hire anyone else without asking me for anything.

That is not generosity. It is the arrangement that makes sense when you are confident the work is good: people stay because the work is worth staying for, not because leaving is expensive. A developer who needs lock-in to retain clients is telling you something about the work.

The one-line version

Before you pay the final invoice on any web project, ask: "If you disappeared tomorrow, could I keep this running?"

The answer should be yes, immediately and without qualification. If it is not, that is the thing to sort out before the last payment clears, because that is the only moment you will ever have real leverage.