Who owns my website if I pay for it monthly?

Is a pay-monthly website really a rental?

It depends on what the contract says. Paying monthly tells you nothing about ownership on its own. Look for the sentence that says whether you own the site or only have the right to use it while you keep paying.

Forward Dawn’s answer is in writing. Our terms say that, unless your services agreement says otherwise, you own your final deliverables once they are paid for.

Who should hold the domain name?

You should. Ask any provider whose name is on the domain registration and which account pays the renewal. If the answer is the provider’s, get that changed before you pay.

At Forward Dawn we’d rather you register the domain yourself, in your own account. If you’d prefer we handle it, we will, and the domain is part of what we hand over to you if you leave.

ICANN’s page on registrants’ rights and responsibilities says a domain registration must be under a registration agreement with an ICANN-accredited registrar, and that you’re entitled to review that agreement at any time. It also says “You will assume sole responsibility for the registration and use of your domain name,” and that you’re entitled to know who your registrar is and how it handles transfers.

What happens to my site if I stop paying?

On a month-to-month plan you cancel by email or through your client portal, and there’s no commitment to stay. If you cancel before design work starts, we refund everything you’ve paid. Our terms say the service runs to the end of the month you’ve already paid for, we don’t bill you again, and we don’t refund a part-month already under way. We confirm every cancellation in writing.

The setup fee is a one-time $749 that covers the design and build of your website and the configuration of your systems, per our pricing page. Once that work has started the fee isn’t refundable, because it has been delivered. It also means that if you walk away after your first month, the build of your site is already paid for, and your final paid-for deliverables are yours to keep.

Annual plans work differently. The setup fee is waived, and if you cancel early we refund the whole months you haven’t used, less the setup fee that was waived.

What should be in writing before I sign?

Three answers, from any provider, in the contract and not only on a sales call.

1. Who is the registrant of your domain name.
2. What you keep if you leave: the design, the content, the files and the accounts, and in what form you get them.
3. Whether the site can be moved to another host or platform, and what that involves.

If a provider can’t answer all three plainly, don’t sign. The third matters less if the site is short-lived and you wouldn’t mind losing it when you cancel. Ask Forward Dawn the same three questions before you sign anything.

What do you keep if you leave Forward Dawn?

Your final paid-for deliverables. The cancellation section of our terms says you keep them when you leave. What stays with us is our underlying tools, templates, systems and know-how.

In practice, leaving should be easy, and we’d like it to be the kind of goodbye you’d still recommend us after. You pick how the handover goes:

• We send you a zip file of your site to take wherever you like.
• We move the site to your new host for you.
• We keep your site up until you’ve put it in its new home, and take ours down once you tell us it’s live.

If we registered your domain, we transfer it to you as part of the same handover.

Our terms also say a signed services agreement controls over anything in them, so that agreement is the document to read for how your deliverables are treated.