Most web designers will tell you that you own your website, and almost all of them mean it. The useful question is what happens if the meaning stops mattering — the relationship ends badly, the business closes, the emails go unanswered.
That is a question about access, not intent. Whoever can log into the registrar controls the domain. Whoever can log into the host controls whether the site is online. Goodwill is not a mechanism. Accounts are.
So this page describes the mechanism.
What you own when the project ends
The website. The design. The code. The content written for it. Your logo, transferred in full. Your domain, and the accounts the domain and hosting live in.
There is no licence fee. There is nothing you have to keep buying from us to stay online. Nothing on the site stops working if you stop talking to us. Another developer can take it over without our involvement or our permission.
The domain
If you don’t have one yet
We register it for you and transfer it into your own registrar account at handover — your login, your billing details, your name on the record.
After that transfer, we cannot move it, transfer it, or take it back. Not “we wouldn’t.” The access we hold afterward does not permit it, and it was set up that way on purpose. If this studio disappeared tomorrow, your domain would sit exactly where it is and you would carry on renewing it without noticing we were gone.
First-year registration is included: one available standard domain, up to $25 in registration cost. Premium and aftermarket extensions cost more than that, and the difference is yours to pay — the domain is still registered to you either way. Renewal after the first year is yours, billed by your registrar at whatever they charge.
If you already have one
It stays exactly where it is. We do not take it over, and we do not move it.
Your new site goes on the domain you already own. That takes one change at your registrar — two nameserver values, which we send you with instructions, or we walk you through it while you stay logged in. We never ask for your registrar password and we never hold your credentials. Where your registrar supports adding a limited user, you can remove us again in one click.
If you have email on that domain, tell us before we switch anything. Email keeps working through the change, but it gets checked deliberately rather than assumed.
Hosting
Hosting is set up in your name and handed to you at launch. The sites are static files — no database, no CMS, no plugins — which is why they can sit on a mainstream host under an ordinary account rather than something we administer on your behalf.
The honest limit: a site is built to run inside a hosting provider’s free allowance, and for a normal small-business website it will. If your usage ever exceeds that allowance, or the provider changes its terms, the ongoing hosting cost is yours. We don’t promise free hosting forever, because nobody can promise that. What we can do is make sure the account is already in your name on the day it matters, so paying for it, or moving the site somewhere cheaper, doesn’t require finding us first.
Email is set up as forwarding on your domain. Mail sent to your business address arrives in whatever inbox you already use. It is included and it is free.
It receives mail. It does not send from your custom address. If you want a full mailbox you can send from, your registrar will sell you one after handover. That limit is written here rather than discovered later, because a forwarding address that can’t reply is the kind of thing people find out at the worst possible moment.
The site itself
Every site is built as static files on a standard, widely-used foundation. No proprietary builder. No in-house platform that only we can maintain. A developer familiar with standard static-site tooling can pick one up, and that is deliberate rather than incidental.
There is a trade attached, and it belongs on this page rather than a quieter one: there’s no content management system, so you don’t log in and edit page text yourself. If your business needs to change its own words weekly, that is a real requirement and it should decide who builds your site. When not to hire us covers it directly.
What it looks like when this is missing
None of the arrangements below are scams. Each one is a reasonable convenience at the moment it’s set up, and most are set up with no bad intent at all. They share one feature: you find out about them on the way out.
- A site built on a platform whose own documentation states it can’t be exported or hosted elsewhere. Your content is yours; the site isn’t portable.
- A domain registered in the designer’s account because it was faster than walking you through it. Years later, it is legally theirs.
- Hosting under the provider’s login, so the site depends on their account staying open and their monthly bill being paid.
- A proprietary in-house system, where the honest problem isn’t that another developer won’t take it over — it’s that there may be no other developer who can.
How to check us, or anyone
One question covers most of it: whose account is each item in, and could you log in today without calling anyone?
Run it item by item — domain, DNS, hosting, source files, form submissions, Search Console, business email, backups, licences. A provider who answers that list crisply and unprompted is showing you how they handle access. A provider who answers “we take care of all that for you” has told you something too.
The website ownership exit test walks the inventory with the exact questions to ask, and what you actually own when it’s done explains why the pieces have to be checked separately.
Ask us the same questions. The answers are in our project terms, in writing, before you pay anything — sections 10 and 11 are what this page is built from.
The packages
Essential is $250, Growth is $500, Authority is $1,000. Every one of them includes the domain, the hosting handover, and full ownership described above — it isn’t an upgrade and it isn’t priced separately. See what each scope covers, or email projects@truepointbyazimuth.com and describe the business. You’ll get a reply.