Your website is three things, not one

What people call “my website” is really three separate pieces, and each one has its own login:

  • The domain name, your address on the internet, held at a domain registrar.
  • The hosting account, the server space where your site lives, often along with your email.
  • The files and content: the design, code, words and photos that make up the site itself.

Any one of the three can be held by someone else. Ownership of the design and content is a copyright question, which I cover in website copyright law in Canada. This article is about the other two.

The domain matters most

If you lose your hosting, you can rebuild the site somewhere else. If you lose your domain, you lose your address, your email, every printed business card and years of Google rankings, all at once.

The person or company listed as the registrant is the legal holder of the domain. For a .ca, the registrant must meet CIRA’s Canadian presence rules, and it should be your business, not your designer or an old employee. My guide to registering a .ca domain explains who qualifies.

Expiry is the other risk. A .ca that is not renewed gets a 40-day renewal grace period, then a 30-day redemption period, and then it is deleted and released for anyone to register. If the renewal notices go to an inbox nobody reads, that clock runs out quietly.

The hosting account should be yours too

Many designers host their clients on their own reseller account. I have done that myself for years, and it is not a bad arrangement. It only becomes a problem when you have no access and no way out. Ask three questions:

  • Whose name and payment card is on the hosting account?
  • Can I get a full copy of my site, files and database, whenever I ask?
  • Where does my business email live, and who can change it?

A good web person answers all three without hesitating. A copy you keep yourself is worth having anyway, for the reasons in website backups that actually work.

A ten-minute check you can do this week

  1. Confirm the domain registrant is your legal business name.
  2. Make sure the contact email on the domain is one you read and control.
  3. Turn on auto-renew, and check the card on file has not expired.
  4. Get your own login to the registrar and the hosting, or at least a written record of where each one is.
  5. Ask for a full backup and store it somewhere you control.
  6. Put the arrangement in writing with whoever looks after your site.

None of this is about distrusting your web person. It is about what happens if they retire, get sick or go out of business. The good ones are glad when you ask, because it protects them too.

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