Why You should Always own your website assets

October 13, 2025

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Should you own your website assets?

It’s not only smart to own your website assets, but crucial. The thing is most businesses give up ownership when working with agencies because the agencies set it up for them and don’t get them access up front, so time goes on without this being given. I get it, the agency wants control, but it’s more of a scare tactic than a smart decision to keep your clients long term.

Like i said, it’s not usually something that comes to the surface right away, it’s usually later down the road when that clients changes agencies they realize, wow we don’t actually own our domain or website hosting. This is what your business depends on. What happens if your domain or hosting goes down and you aren’t with that agency anymore? Your website isn’t live, your sales go down. Big big revenue loss if that happened. We want to explain at Consorella Agency what it means to own your assets and why it matters for long-term growth. We will cover how to audit before it becomes a problem.

What does it mean to own your website assets?

It basically means you own those assets that make your website function.

You own your website assets when:

Your domain is in your name, and your email account.
You control hosting, and it’s in your email account.
You have full admin access to the content management system
Your domain is in your name, and your email account.
You own the website which means you are the owner in the backend, anyone else is secondary as editor.
You own the website which means you are the owner in the backend, anyone else is secondary as editor.
You can move, migrate, or rebuild the site without permission

If any of those are missing, you have partial ownership, not full ownership.

Ownership is not defined by invoices. Just because you pay that agency doesn’t mean you own your website, domain and hosting. Check your contract. Some agencies like to hold businesses hostage with these assets.

Does the agency own my assets if they built it?

It really depends how the site was set up. If they registered the domain on their behalf and in their account, they own it. If they host it on their shared server, they own it. If they use proprietary builders, or design files internally, there’s a chance they own it.

Sometimes it doesn’t mean the agency is being malicious, it means they create a dependency.

What does domain and hosting even mean?

You can’t have one without the other.

Domain ownership

Your domain should always be registered under your business name, using an email address you control. If an agency registered it for you, confirm that you have direct access to the registrar account. Your domain should always be registered in a business email you own. If an agency registers it for you then you need admin access to that domain through their registrar. Whoever controls the domain controls where your website lives.

Hosting ownership

Hosting is where your website “lives”. If hosting is in an agency account you are dependent on them. You want to be able to access your hosting dashboard, manage billing, have access to backups, and grant or revoke access.

What is a real-world example of this?

In our discovery calls these kinds of situations repeatedly come up:

An agency relationship ends and the site cannot be transferred
A platform raises prices beyond the business’s budget
A redesign requires rebuilding because assets are inaccessible
SEO traffic drops after a forced migration
A domain expires because the business did not control billing

None of these are edge cases. They are common, preventable failures.

How do I audit my ownership?

Great, let’s do this! A quick Whois search can tell you where you domain and hosting is located.

https://www.whois.com/

Consorella Agency can also help you with this, book a discovery call today so we can help you!

What you should take away from this

Your website is not disposable, it’s your biggest business asset.

If someone else wants to restrict access, let’s not trust those guys.

Own your website assets. Control the foundation. Everything else becomes easier when you do.

Every partnership starts with a conversation.

Let’s see what’s possible for your brand.