Who owns my website after it is built?

You should own all of it: the domain registered to your business, hosting in your account, code in a repository you control, and the payment provider account in your name. If any of those sit with the supplier, you are renting the site at their discretion.

Is it cheaper to hire an offshore developer?

Usually yes, because the hourly rate reflects a different cost of living. The risk is not quality — it is contracting: who owns the accounts, what makes the personal-data transfer lawful, how payment is staged, and what you are left holding if they stop replying.

How do I check who owns my domain?

Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain and read the registrant field. It should name your business. If it names your developer, an agency, or a privacy-proxy service you did not arrange, you do not control the single asset everything else depends on.

Hiring

What if my web developer disappears?

Recover the domain first, because everything depends on it and a transfer takes days rather than minutes. Then hosting, then take a full backup with whatever access you still have. If the code was never in a repository you control, budget for a rebuild.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 197 words 3 sections

The recovery order

Domain — check WHOIS, initiate a transfer with the auth code
Hosting — request account transfer, or migrate to an account in your name
Backups — take a full copy of files and database immediately
Search Console — verify by DNS record, which a former supplier cannot revoke
Payment provider — change credentials and remove unrecognised users

How to make it a non-event next time

Domain registered to you, always, with no exceptions
Hosting in your account, with the developer added as a user
Code in your repository, committed during the build
Written handover documentation as a quote line item
A boring, widely used stack another developer can pick up

The honest assessment

Sometimes rebuilding is cheaper than recovering, particularly where the code is undocumented and the original developer is unreachable. Get that assessed before spending months in a dispute over an asset that may not be worth the fight.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Who actually owns your website — a checklist you can verify today covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.