The most expensive sentence in small-business IT is not about a hack or an outage. It is: the guy who set it up stopped answering.
Nothing is broken when it happens. The site is up, the email works. Then the domain comes up for renewal, or you want to change a phone number on the homepage, and it turns out the only account that can do it belongs to somebody who has moved on.
Four things to own in your own name
- The domain. Registered to your business, billed to a card you control, with renewal notices going to an address more than one person reads.
- The DNS. Whoever controls this controls where your website and your email actually point. It is the quietest and most total form of leverage in the whole stack.
- The hosting or deployment account. Yours, with your vendor invited to it — not theirs with you as a guest.
- The code and the content. In a repository you can log into, not attached to one person's laptop.
How to check this afternoon
Look up who your domain is registered to and which inbox gets the renewal notice. Then try to log in to the place your site is hosted. If any of that ends at somebody else's personal account, you have found the thing to fix — and it is much easier to fix while everyone is still on good terms.
What a real handoff looks like
Every account in your name, credentials handed over, and a written list of what is where. Not because a relationship is expected to end badly, but because a business should be able to survive one ending at all.
That is how we hand off, every time. It is also a fair question to ask us. How we work