New year, new resolutions — here’s one for your business that takes twenty minutes and can save you five figures: verify that you actually own your digital assets.

We’re prompted to write this every January because that’s when it happens. A business decides to switch web vendors, or the vendor retires, or disappears, or the relationship sours — and suddenly they discover the domain is registered to the old developer’s personal account, the hosting login died with someone’s old email, and the website code exists nowhere they can reach. What should be a routine handoff becomes a ransom negotiation with someone who has no incentive to be gracious.

We’ve helped untangle enough of these to promise you: prevention is twenty minutes; the cure is weeks and real money.

The audit: five questions

Open a document and answer these, with logins verified — not from memory.

1. Your domain. Who is the registrant of record, and can you log into the registrar account today? Your domain is the single most important digital asset you have — lose it and you lose your email, your search history, everything. It must be registered to your business, in an account you control, with billing on your card. “Our web guy handles it” is the sentence that precedes every horror story.

2. Your DNS. Same question, one layer down: who can edit the records that point your domain at your website and your email? You should know where this lives even if you never touch it.

3. Your website’s code. If your current developer vanished tonight, could you hand your site to a new one? The answer is yes only if the code lives in a repository (GitHub or similar) that your business account owns or has full access to. If the only copy lives on the developer’s laptop or in a proprietary builder, you don’t own a website — you’re leasing one.

4. Your hosting. Is the account yours, with your billing? Vendor-managed hosting is fine and normal — we do it for clients — but managed should mean “they operate it,” never “it’s invisible to you.” You should hold either the keys or a contract that guarantees handover.

5. Your data. Customer lists, analytics history, form submissions, reviews. Can you export each of them, today, in a usable format? Try one. Platforms measure their moats in export friction.

Grading yourself

Five confident yeses: excellent — you’re in the minority, carry on. Any hesitation: fix it now, while relationships are good and nothing is urgent. Transferring a domain between friendly parties is paperwork; between adversarial ones, it’s litigation.

The awkward part: fixing it usually means asking your current vendor questions that sound like distrust. A professional won’t flinch — the good ones volunteer this structure up front, because ownership clarity protects them too. Anyone who gets defensive about you owning your own domain has told you something important.

Our bias, stated plainly

This is how we build: your domain in your registrar account, code in repositories you can take, hosting transparent, data exportable. If we ever part ways with a client, everything walks out the door with them. We think that should be the industry default rather than a selling point — but until it is, it’s a selling point.

Not sure what you’d find if you ran the audit? We’ll help you run it — no strings, twenty minutes, and you’ll sleep better.