Should my website be hosted by the company that built it?

Building is the work of making your website. Hosting is the server that keeps it online, and you pay for it every year. You can buy both from one company or from two.

The people who ask us this are usually looking for a web designer and would rather deal with one company. A well-known tourist attraction in Penang did exactly that. Its old website was hosted elsewhere, and it moved the hosting to us with the revamp. It wanted one team able to troubleshoot from head to toe when a problem comes up.

Your website depends on the server underneath it. If the hosting company changes a server setting, something on your site can break, and your web designer cannot see why.

A contact form that stops sending mail is a good example. On a server we manage, we can find the fault and fix it ourselves. On someone else's server we cannot change the setup, so you end up passing messages between us and the hosting company. The fix may be small. The delay and the back and forth are the real cost.

That is why we treat hosting and warranty as one decision. On some projects we give up to 10 years of warranty, as long as we host the site, with plans from RM439/year. During the warranty we fix any bug or error you did not cause.

We cannot promise that on a server we do not control. In the few hundred sites we look after, most have stayed with us for more than 10 years, and some since 2002. Our first client, Armstrong Auto Parts, signed that year and is still with us.

Hosting elsewhere is still your choice, as long as you know the risk. With us, it would mean no warranty and chargeable troubleshooting at a reasonable fee. We would also need at least cPanel access, which is the control panel for a hosting account, and a retainer may apply.

The most common mistake is buying the cheapest plan, then asking why the site is slow or always down. In the sites we look after, shared hosting is fine for a simple static site, which means plain pages with no database. A heavy WooCommerce shop is better on a VPS, a private portion of a server with its own resources.

The other mistake is choosing a company that closes down a few years later. Before you commit, ask how long it has been running.

A disappearing developer is common too. Your hosting sits under the developer's account, so when the developer goes, the hosting goes as well. If you are lucky the domain is still yours, but the website has to be redone from scratch.

Losing control of your domain is the worst case. ICANN, the organisation that coordinates domain names worldwide, says the registrant takes sole responsibility for a domain. So if a developer registered it under their own name, getting it back can be troublesome.

Being tied to one company is a fair worry, and this is the answer to it. Ask who is listed as the registrant, and check that it is you. The site and its content should belong to you too. Then you can leave any provider, including us.

If your shop runs on Shopify, stay there. Shopify includes hosting in its plans, so you do not need to buy it separately.

Having your own IT team is a different case. It can work, but we do not recommend relying on it. If your IT person resigns, the website, hosting and email can be left hanging. Plan for that before it happens.

• Changing your web hosting, Google Search Central, on moving to a new host and keeping the old one running until its traffic reaches zero
• Registrants' benefits and responsibilities, ICANN, on the registrant's sole responsibility for a domain
• Transferring your domain name, ICANN, on how a domain moves between providers and the authorisation code it needs
• Shopify pricing, Shopify, which states that hosting is included with its plans
• DNS basics, Google Workspace, on the separate records that control a domain's website and email