Ways Your Website Can Be Held Hostage
The person or company you’re working with may hold your site hostage in several ways. Here are some ways you could be held hostage:
No Hosting and Domain Access
Some companies may insist on managing both your website hosting and domain registration. Not having any access to these accounts can lead to the person hosting your website holding your domain and website hostage. If you don’t have full administrative level access over these accounts, moving your website to a different provider can be challenging.
How to Avoid Developers Holding Your Website Hostage
Ultimately, being proactive can take you a long way in avoiding a hostage situation. Many of these situations can be avoided by doing the following:
Have Full Access to Your Domain
Most of the issues we see come from domain and hosting ownership. To ensure you have full access to all your web content regardless of who builds it, you should be the one to register your own domain and hosting account. (If you’re looking for Hosting, we recommend HostGator.)
As a side note, you will still need to provide full access to the developer so that they can complete their work. This is not a problem, because you own the registrar and hosting space and can add them as an administrator with full access during the course of your project.
Understand Your Contract
Communication
Before starting your project, make sure that all parties are aware about the web development process. This includes topics like what access needs to be provided to ensure your web development team can perform their work, and how the website handoff will be completed. At the end of the project, you should have all of the login credentials needed to access your web hosting, domain, and login for your website CMS.
Conclusion
Ultimately, when working with a developer, the best approach is to communicate openly and ask any questions before starting work to make sure everyone is on the right page.