Do you own your website?

Recently I was involved in the sale of an on-line business and part of my involvement was to move the client’s site to a new server that the purchasing party owned.

Imagine my surprise when I contacted the development company to facilitate what we needed to move the site only to be told sorry you cannot do that. This is not uncommon and if you have had a site built by a company that has it’s own CMS there is a good chance you don’t actually own your whole site.

In most cases the CMS stays the property of the development company and as such you must host your site on their servers, this is often at a premium hosting rate and excessive excess data charges.

Of course this is all in the original contract you would of signed with the company in the beginning, although the issue is many clients fail to understand what it is the developers are often even saying to them at no fault of the client.

As you can imaging the party that was buying the business were not overly happy to find out that the business they were just about to purchase they did not actually really own. With a statement from the original developers of saying ‘they are welcome to their content’ little comfort at all.

There are many reasons why you must own the website in its entirety, from flexibility too developing other functionality within the site, to hosting where you want the site hosted. In this persons example they had their own dedicated servers where all their websites were hosted and simply did not want a site out of the loop as it were.

If you are about to have a site developed with a company that is using their CMS as a sales tool, read the contracts carefully and ask the question do I own all the rights to the website, am I able to host the site where I please.

This is another strong reason Open Source platform such as Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and for e-commerce Magento are a smart decision for your companies website development.