Who built your website, and can you still reach them?

Every business that has called us in a panic called about the same thing. Not a design they had gone off. Not a feature they wanted. The site was down, or the site was stuck, and the person who built it could not be reached.

We are not going to pretend this is an argument for hiring an agency. Plenty of freelancers are excellent and plenty of agencies are careless. The variable that actually predicts trouble is not the type of supplier. It is whether the arrangement survives that supplier losing interest.

Four ways this actually goes wrong

These are composites, but nothing here is invented. If you have been in business a few years you have probably heard a version of at least one.

The site stopped and the invoice arrived from somebody else. A business paid once for a website, understood that to be the end of it, and two years later got an email from a hosting company they had never heard of saying the account was overdue. The builder had put the hosting on his own account and been paying it himself, quietly, until he stopped. Nobody had done anything dishonest. The arrangement simply had no plan for him losing interest.

The builder was part-time and the business was not. A restaurant had a site built by someone with a full-time job elsewhere. It worked. Then the menu needed changing before a bank holiday, and the emails went unanswered for eleven days, because the person answering them was at their actual job. The work was fine. The availability was never going to match what a trading business needs.

The student graduated. This one is the most sympathetic and the most common. A capable student builds a genuinely good site for a few hundred dollars. Then they get a real job in another city and their side work quietly ends. There is no malice in it. But the site is on their hosting, the domain is in their name, and the handover conversation never happens because nobody thought to have it while things were going well.

Nobody could find the domain. The most frightening one, because it is the hardest to fix. A business wanted to move to a new supplier and discovered the domain had been registered by the original builder, under his email, with a registrar the owner could not name. Getting a domain back from someone who is not answering is a formal dispute process. It is slow, and while it runs, your email can stop working too.

What these have in common

None of them is a competence problem. In three of the four the work was fine.

What they share is that a single person held something the business could not continue without, and there was no arrangement for what happened when that person moved on. That is a structural risk, and it does not care how good the code is.

The question to ask about any supplier — us included — is not “are they any good”. It is “what breaks if they disappear tomorrow, and how long does it take me to fix it?”

The questions that prevent all of this

Ask these before money changes hands. Anyone reputable will answer them immediately and without irritation, because they are the same things they would ask.

1. Whose name is the domain in? It should be yours, on an account you can log into, today. Not “we manage it for you.” Not “it is under our account for convenience.” Yours. If someone else buys it for you, it should be transferred at what they actually paid.

2. Whose name is the hosting in? Same answer. If your supplier hosts it on their own plan alongside other clients, ask what happens to your site if they stop paying that bill.

3. Who has the Google Business Profile? For a local business this is often worth more than the website. It is very common for an agency to create one and stay the owner rather than adding themselves as a manager. Ask to be the owner. It costs them nothing to agree.

4. If I leave, what do I take? The answer should be: the domain, the files, the content, the images, and every third-party account, with no exit fee. If the answer is vague, that vagueness is the product.

5. What is your response time, in writing? Not “we are very responsive.” A number. One business day is a reasonable answer. “It depends” is not.

6. Is this your job or your evening? This is not an insult and a good freelancer will answer it plainly. You are not asking whether they are skilled. You are asking whether a Tuesday-afternoon problem gets Tuesday-afternoon attention.

7. What happens in year two? Who applies updates, renews the certificate, renews the domain, and notices when something breaks? If the answer is nobody, the price you were quoted is for a build, not for a website.

Checking what you already own

If you already have a site, you can verify most of this yourself in about ten minutes and without asking anyone.

Find out who the domain is registered to. Search for “whois” plus your domain name, or use your registrar’s lookup. Most registrations are behind privacy protection now, which hides the name — but it will still show you the registrar. If you cannot log into that registrar, that is the thing to fix first, before anything else on this list.

Find the renewal date. A domain that lapses takes your email with it. Put the date in your calendar yourself rather than relying on someone forwarding you the reminder.

Log into your own hosting. Not your builder’s dashboard — the hosting company’s. If you do not know which company it is, ask. If you cannot get an answer, that is your answer.

Check the Google Business Profile owner. In your profile settings, look at who is listed as owner rather than manager. If it is not you, request ownership. This is a normal request and there is a formal process for it.

When a cheap build is genuinely the right call

We would be doing exactly what this article is complaining about if we ended it by saying you should always hire a company. You should not.

A cheap build, or a build you do yourself, is a good decision when the site is not load-bearing. If your business does not depend on it — if nobody is finding you through it, if no one books through it, if it going down for a week would be an inconvenience rather than a loss — then paying agency rates to maintain it is money spent on insurance you do not need.

It becomes the wrong decision at a specific and recognisable moment: when the site starts producing something you would miss. Bookings. Enquiries. The first impression a referral gets before they call. From that point the question changes from “what does this cost” to “what does an outage cost”, and those two questions have very different answers.

What paying more should actually buy

If you do decide to pay for this properly, be clear about what you are buying, because it is not design. Design is the visible part and the easiest part.

You are buying continuity: someone whose job it is to notice. Certificates renew. Software gets security updates. A form quietly stops sending email and nothing announces it — you find out when a customer says they wrote and never heard back. Somebody has to be watching for that, and that somebody has to still be there in eighteen months.

You are buying reachability: a phone number that gets answered on a Tuesday, by someone who can act.

And you are buying an exit: the ability to leave and take everything with you, which sounds like a strange thing to pay for until you have watched somebody try to do it without one.

If a supplier cannot give you those three things, the price is not the reason to say no. Those are.

The short version

Ask whose name things are in. Get the answer before you pay, not after. Put the domain renewal in your own calendar. And decide honestly whether your website is decorative or load-bearing, because that single question determines whether the cheap option is clever or expensive.