If your business gets a new website this year, the most important decision you make has nothing to do with the design. It has to do with whose name is on the registration. Owner-of-record is a sleepy phrase that decides what happens when your relationship with your web person ends. Most rural small businesses we audit lose this fight at the start of the project and do not realise it until two years in.
Here is the short version: every digital asset in your business has an owner-of-record. The domain has one. The hosting account has one. The source code has one. The brand assets have one. The Google Business Profile has one. If any of those are in your web person's name instead of yours, you are renting your own business.
What "in your name" actually means
It means the credit card on the account is yours. The login is in your name. The email on the registrar is your work email. If you stop paying your agency tomorrow, you can sign in and keep the lights on.
It does not mean the agency cannot have access. We have admin access to most of our clients' Vercel and Cloudflare accounts. That is fine. It is just that the legal owner is the client, every time, on every asset.
How to check your current setup
If you already have a website, here are four checks to run today.
- Domain. Go to whois.com or your registrar's dashboard. Look at the registrant. If it is your web person, your nephew, or a company you have never heard of, that is a problem.
- Hosting. Whose login do you have for the hosting dashboard? If you do not have one, your hosting is not yours.
- Source files. Ask your web person for a zip of the current site or a link to the repository. If they hesitate, that is a problem.
- Google Business Profile. Open business.google.com and confirm you are the primary owner. Many small businesses are still listed as managers under someone else's account.
If any of these come back wrong, the fix is a one-day project before it is anything else. Get the transfer started before you do another thing on the site.
What we ship on day one
Every Mule project hands these over on day one of going live: domain registration receipt in your name, hosting account credentials in your name, full source-file repository under your account, brand guidelines doc, content folder, and the Google Business Profile transferred to you. You do not have to chase us for any of it. It is part of what you paid for.
The optional hosting and maintenance subscriptions we offer do not change that. The site is yours from the day it ships. If you drop the subscription a year in, the site keeps running on the hosting account in your name, no permission needed from us.
This is the unsexy infrastructure of trust. It is what lets a small business sleep at night.