The question nobody asks before they sign
If you are hiring a web studio you have never met in person, the fear is reasonable. You are about to hand over money to people who could, in theory, vanish with your website. We are one of those remote studios: we work from our own offices for New Zealand businesses and we have never met most of our clients face to face. So we want to answer this question directly instead of dancing around it. Here is what happens to your website if your designer disappears, and here is what a fair handover looks like from anyone.
The short answer is that it depends on who holds the keys. A website is not one thing. It is three separate things that most business owners treat as a single purchase: the domain, the hosting and the source code. If the same person controls all three and they disappear, you have a problem. If you control them, you mostly have an inconvenience.
The three parts of every website
The domain is your address, the name people type, like yourbusiness.co.nz. It is registered with a registrar, and whoever holds that account holds the address. If your designer registered it in their name and never transfers it, the domain is legally theirs, and recovering it after they vanish can take weeks and involve the dispute service.
The hosting is where the website actually lives, the server that sends your pages to visitors. It is an ongoing cost, not a one-off. Ours is published on our pricing page: hosting with business email is $29 a month, and your domain stays registered in your own name rather than inside our bundle. That is the ongoing relationship, and it is worth knowing what you are signing up for before you sign.
The source code is the website itself, the files that make it look and work the way it does. Some designers treat these files as their property and hand over only a finished product. Others, and this is what we do, hand over the files as part of the job. If you have the files, another designer can take over. If you do not, you are starting again.
If you cannot log into it, you do not own it.
What we hand over
Because we work remotely, we carry the same exposure we are asking you to think about. So we have made the handover part of the job, not an extra. The domain is registered in your name, or transferred to you if you already have one. The hosting is set up under your control. The source code is delivered at launch. Nothing is held hostage, because there is no reason to hold it: you pay half up front and half on launch, so we are paid in full the day the site goes live.
We think that is what a fair handover looks like, and we would expect it from anyone we hired. Every website is $500, one page or six, paid half up front and half on launch. The ongoing cost is hosting with business email at $29 a month, and the domain sits in your name from day one. That is the whole relationship, written down.
- The domain registered in your name, or a transfer started before you pay the final invoice.
- A hosting account you can log into, not a password held by the designer.
- A copy of the source code, or at least the final files, in your hands.
- Logins for everything the site depends on: email, booking tools, analytics, Google Business Profile.
- A written note of what renews when, and what it costs.
- A defined support window after launch, so you know when the job is finished.
- $500
- for any website, one page or six, fixed before we start
- 50/50
- half paid up front, half when the site goes live
- $29
- a month for hosting and business email, domain in your name
Who owns my domain if you build my site?
You do. We register it in your name, or transfer it to you if you already own it. The account is yours from day one.
What happens if I want to leave and take my site elsewhere?
We hand over the domain, the hosting access and a copy of the source code. There is no exit fee and nothing held back. You paid half up front and half on launch, so the relationship is settled when the site goes live.
Do I have to keep paying you for hosting?
No. Hosting with business email is $29 a month through us, but you can move at any time. The domain is already in your name and the site files are yours, so another host can take them.
What happens if you disappear instead?
The same rules protect you. Because the domain is in your name and the hosting is under your control, the website, the email and the address stay with you even if we are gone.
Before you sign with anyone, ask three questions: who owns the domain, who controls the hosting, and what do I walk away with if we part ways. If the answers are vague, treat that as the answer.
Ask us the same questions. We would rather you check than trust us on faith. A website should be an asset you own, not a service you rent from someone who might not answer, and the trust is the product here.