Your supplier should not own your domain

A surprising number of companies do not own the domain their business runs on. It is registered to the agency that built the site, or to a developer who has since moved on, or to an email address nobody can access.

What "owning" means specifically

The registrar account is in the company’s name, with a company email as the contact and company payment details on file. Not the supplier’s account with the company as a note. The distinction matters at exactly one moment — when the relationship ends — and at that moment it matters enormously.

The same applies to everything else

• DNS — whoever controls it controls where your email goes
• Hosting and deployment accounts
• Analytics properties, which contain years of history that cannot be recreated
• Advertising accounts, which carry learning and history with them
• Search Console, which holds the record of how you are found
• The code repository

How to fix it without a fight

Ask for an access matrix: every account, who owns it, who has access, and what happens on termination. A supplier working in good faith will produce one, because it is in their interest too — it removes them from the critical path. A supplier who resists is telling you something worth knowing.

We create accounts in the client’s name from the first day of a project. It is not generosity. A supplier who holds a client’s domain has a hostage rather than a client, and that is a worse business to be in.