Owner- of- record.
Owner-of-record is the legal and technical control of your domain, hosting, code, and analytics. At Mule Digital, every account is registered in your name from day one — fire us tomorrow, nothing breaks and nothing locks.
Who actually owns your website right now?
Many agencies register your domain in their name, set up hosting on their own account, and keep the source code in their private repository. You're paying them to rent your own business presence.
When you try to leave, the keys aren't yours. The agency holds them. Your only options are to keep paying or to start over from scratch.
Why agencies do it (and why it hurts you)
Locked-in clients are easier to upsell. Renewals are easier to extract. The agency benefits from the friction of leaving — it's a feature of their pricing model, not a bug.
You lose leverage in every negotiation that follows. You also lose the website itself if the agency disappears, gets acquired, or simply stops returning email.
What owner-of-record looks like at Mule
Your domain registrar account is yours. Your hosting account is yours. Your analytics property is yours. Your repository, your source files, your CMS credentials — yours. You receive the keys at handoff, in writing.
You can fire Mule the next day, hire any developer in the world, and the site keeps running without a hiccup. That's the test of true ownership.
What questions should you ask any agency before signing?
Five questions decide it: Who is the registered owner of the domain? Whose name is on the hosting account? Do I get the full source code at handoff? Will my analytics property be transferred to my Google account? What happens to my site if our relationship ends?
If the agency hesitates, dodges, or charges extra for any of these, you're being asked to rent your own business.
About owner-of-record.
What if my current agency has my domain in their name?
You can transfer it. Every domain registrar has a transfer-out process. The current owner has to approve. If they refuse without legitimate cause, you can escalate to ICANN — domain hostage situations are a real category of complaint and registrars take them seriously.
Does owner-of-record cost more than the alternative?
No. It costs Mule nothing extra to register accounts in your name. Some agencies charge a premium to 'transfer' assets that should have been yours from the start — that fee is a tell.
Can I keep my existing CMS or hosting if I work with Mule?
Usually yes. We audit on a case-by-case basis. If you're on Squarespace, Wix, or a similar proprietary platform and the lock-in is genuinely severe, we'll recommend a clean rebuild on portable infrastructure — and explain the trade-off in writing first.
Is owner-of-record the same as 'we own the code'?
It's broader. Code ownership is part of it, but a domain you don't own or a hosting account in someone else's name leaves you just as stuck. Owner-of-record covers every account, file, and credential that runs your website.
Work with a studio that means it.
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