SeekMarketing

Web Design & Development · 18 August 2026

Who owns your website when you leave

The domain, the hosting account and the code can each sit in someone else's name. Check the registrant record before the build, not after it ends.

Nothing in Malaysian law stops anyone calling themselves a web studio. There is no register to check, no number to quote, and no board to complain to. That is not a warning about the trade — most of it is fine — it is a statement about where the risk actually sits.

It sits in the handover.

Three things, three owners

A website is not one asset. It is at least three, and they can end up in three different names without anyone intending it:

  • The domain. A .my domain has a registrant on record. That record should name your company.
  • The hosting account. Whoever holds the login controls whether the site stays up.
  • The code and the design files. Separate again, and covered below.

The common failure is not theft. It is that a studio registered the domain on your behalf in year one, nobody thought about it, and four years later the person who set it up has left and the renewal notice goes to an address that no longer exists.

Registrant, not technical contact

A domain record has several contact roles. The one that matters is the registrant — the owner. A studio can legitimately sit in the administrative or technical contact slot while your company is the registrant, and that is the arrangement you want.

Ask to see the record. If your company is not the registrant, ask for it to be transferred, and do that while the relationship is good rather than while it is ending.

The code

Section 26(2) of the Copyright Act 1987 works in the buyer’s favour here: where a work is commissioned and paid for, copyright is deemed transferred to whoever commissioned it. But the section carries a qualifier — that transfer applies subject to any agreement between the parties.

Which means a standard terms document can take it back, and some do. Read that clause. If it reserves ownership to the studio and licenses the site back to you, that may still be a perfectly reasonable deal, but you should be choosing it rather than discovering it.

What to ask, before anything is built

  • Whose name goes on the domain registrant record?
  • Who holds the registrar and hosting logins, and how are they handed over?
  • Does your standard contract vary the default position on copyright?
  • If we part company, what do we leave with?

Why it is worth the conversation

Every one of these is cheap to settle at the start and expensive to unpick later. A studio that answers all four without hesitating has done it before. One that treats the questions as a lack of trust has told you something useful too.