It is in neither the contract nor the quote, yet it becomes the biggest problem years later: whose name the accounts are in. Which account the domain is registered under, whose card pays for the hosting, where the code actually lives. If those three are not yours, the site is yours but control of it is not.
What makes this so awkward is that there are no symptoms while the relationship is good. It is genuinely convenient to have someone else looking after it. Everything surfaces at once when the person you worked with moves on, when the company closes, or simply when you decide to work with someone else.
Five things to check the name on
The domain matters most. Lose it and you lose the address; lose the address and you lose the search standing you built, the URL printed on your cards and every link a customer saved. Check that the registrant is you or your company. Having your supplier as an administrative contact is fine — being the registrant is not.
For hosting, look at the payment method as well as the account name. If the supplier’s card pays for it, the site goes down with the relationship. Open the account in your own name and give the supplier collaborator access instead. Nearly every host and cloud provider supports this now.
The code repository is the least familiar item for non-technical founders. Code normally lives in a Git repository, and a repository sitting under an individual’s personal account can leave with that individual. Create an organisation account in the company name and keep owner rights with the company; developers only need write access.
If it is already in someone else’s name
In most cases it can be recovered. The critical thing is to do it while relations are good. Asking after a dispute has started makes every step slower.
Work in this order. First, write down the current state — for each of the five layers, fill in whose name, which account, and which payment method. Any box you cannot fill is itself the first question to ask. Then start with the domain, because domain transfers follow a fixed procedure and take a few days.
The same applies when you hire us
This rule has no exceptions, and we are not one of them. This site sells WordPress upgrade and optimisation work, and what we need to do it is access to a client’s server — never ownership of a client’s accounts. Domain, hosting and licences stay in the client’s name throughout, and when the work is finished the client simply changes the credentials.
If you want one signal for choosing well, it is this: a supplier who raises account ownership before you do. It is a suggestion that makes their own life slightly less convenient, which is exactly why it tells you something.
How credentials are requested and handled in real work is written out on our process page, and the full scope of the work is on the optimization program page.
Next part
With ownership settled, back to the paperwork. The next part is the definition of “done” — without it in writing, there is no defensible moment to release the final payment.