domain names

What to Ask Before Choosing a Website Builder (Avoid Lock-In)

Signing up for a website builder takes ten minutes. Realizing you can’t get your content out of it can take years off your patience. Most people pick a builder based on templates and price, then find out later that the design, layout, and even the written content are trapped inside a proprietary editor with no …

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Who Owns Your Website? A Checklist Before You Hire a Designer

Every year, small business owners find out the hard way that they don’t actually own the website they’ve been paying for. The domain is registered in the designer’s name, the hosting account is theirs, and when the relationship goes sour or the designer disappears, the business is locked out of its own front door. This …

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Signs Your Web Designer Is Holding Your Website Hostage

You paid for a website. You’d assume that means you own it — the domain, the hosting, the code, all of it. But a surprising number of small business owners find out the hard way that they can’t touch their own site without going through the person who built it, and that person has gone …

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What Happens If You Stop Paying Your Website Builder?

Missing a payment on your website doesn’t erase it overnight, but what happens next depends entirely on what kind of “website builder” you’re dealing with. A DIY platform like Wix or Squarespace follows a fairly predictable countdown from past-due to offline to deleted. A site built by a freelancer or agency is a different story, …

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