Almost every unhappy website relationship starts the same way. Nobody wrote down what was included. Six months in, the client asks for something they assumed was covered, the provider says that is extra, and both of them are annoyed — not because either behaved badly, but because the boundary was never drawn.
So this page draws ours. It is deliberately specific about the unglamorous parts: what happens when you want a new page, who owns the code, and what your website looks like on the day you decide to stop paying us.
What custody actually is.
Website Custody is a managed service on a licensed platform. You pay an annual fee and someone is accountable for your website continuing to work — it stays online, it stays current, the domain gets renewed, the form keeps arriving in your inbox, and when something breaks there is a named person whose job it is to fix it.
What it is not is a purchase. You are not buying our software, and we are not selling you a copy of the system we use to build every site we run. That distinction sounds like a technicality. It is the single most important thing on this page, and everything below follows from it.
The honest one-line version: your domain, your supplied content and your business data remain yours. Our platform, source and reusable system remain ours. If custody ends cleanly, your finished website can stay online on your domain as a frozen deployment — but updates, forms, integrations, maintenance and support stop.
What every tier includes.
There is a ladder of custody tiers, and they differ mainly in how much attention and how many updates you get. But there is a core underneath all of them that never changes, whatever you pay:
The site itself, built and deployed
Implemented in our maintained static stack, hosted on a global CDN with SSL and privacy-respecting analytics. Fast by construction rather than by later optimisation.
Your own domain — at every tier, no exceptions
No provider subdomains at any price. You are the registrant. Where we register on your behalf, the agreement carries a free, unconditional transfer on request — not only when you leave. The domain itself is billed at cost — one line on the same annual invoice, no markup — and we track the renewal so it never lapses.
A working contact form
Delivered to your email, with spam protection. Enquiries are your data, not ours.
Uptime monitoring and backups
Version-controlled, so a bad change can be reversed rather than rebuilt.
DNS management and renewal tracking
The administrative work that quietly kills small-business websites when nobody is watching the expiry date.
A written custody summary
At activation and again at exit — what exists, where it lives, who controls it.
The tiers above that entry point add scheduled check-ins, a number of content updates per month or per year, and at the top end a lead tracker and dashboard so the website feeds your operations instead of just sitting there. The current ladder and prices are on the Digital page rather than here, because prices change and this page should not go stale.
What is never included.
This is the list that prevents arguments. None of the following is covered by any custody tier. All of it can be done — it is quoted separately, in writing, before it starts:
| Not in custody | Why it sits outside |
|---|---|
| New copywriting | Writing is open-ended work; custody covers publishing what exists, not producing it |
| Blog CMS and article publishing | A content operation is a service in its own right, not a hosting feature |
| Booking systems, e-commerce, payments | Each is an application with its own failure modes and support burden |
| Login or member portals | Authentication changes the security profile of the whole site |
| SEO campaigns and ads management | Ongoing marketing labour, not website upkeep |
| Email hosting | We manage the website DNS records; mailboxes are a separate product |
| Custom application work | Bespoke by definition, so bespoke pricing |
| Unlimited edits | No fixed fee can cover an unbounded workload honestly |
Third-party costs are also yours: domain registration and renewal, paid software seats, and premium DNS are billed through at cost. We do not mark them up, and we do not absorb them.
There is a smaller boundary inside the update allowance too. A minor update means text corrections, contact detail changes, swapping a few existing images, a short announcement, service wording, a replaced PDF, team details. It does not mean designing a new page, restructuring the site, or producing graphics — those are quoted.
Who owns what.
This is where most website relationships are vague, and vagueness here is what produces hostage situations. Ours is written down.
| Yours | Ours |
|---|---|
| The domain and the registrar account | The Astro source files and private repository |
| Content, photographs, documents and brand assets you supply | The platform — components, design system, build configuration |
| Your business and enquiry data | Deployment workflows and internal tooling |
| The original pre-migration files you gave us | General improvements made while serving any client |
During custody you hold a licence to operate the site we built on your domain. That licence is real and it is enough to run your business on. What it is not is ownership of the underlying system — the same platform and components run other clients' sites, and selling one client the platform would break every other client's service.
We deliberately do not say "no lock-in," because it would not be true and you would find that out at the worst possible moment. What we say instead is no hostage assets. There is a difference, and the difference is this whole section.
What happens when you leave.
You should know this before you sign, not when you are already unhappy. Custody runs in twelve-month terms. Tell us at least thirty days before renewal and the term simply runs to its end.
Then a standard exit happens, and it is included — no separate exit fee:
Your data comes out
Enquiry data exported once in a portable format, and the original pre-migration files you supplied returned or confirmed.
The site is frozen, not switched off
We produce one final compiled deployment and leave it live on your domain. Visitors still see your website.
Our machinery is removed
Form routing, analytics routing, integrations and any claim that we maintain the site all come out. Forms are replaced with direct email or phone contact.
Our access is revoked
Deployment credentials and administrative access are removed, and you get a DNS and account inventory plus written exit confirmation.
What the frozen site contains is the compiled public website — the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and media a browser downloads. It does not include the source files, the repository or its history, the reusable components and platform, or the build pipeline. Another provider can keep the frozen site running for you. They receive no rights to our system, and nothing stops them rebuilding you a new site from your own content and brand assets.
And everything recurring stops on that date: updates, monitoring, backups, dependency and security maintenance, form operation, renewal tracking, and someone being accountable when it breaks. That is not a penalty. It is simply the service you were paying for, ending.
The parts that cost money
Saying "the exit is free" without qualification would be the same dishonesty as "no lock-in." The standard exit above is included. These are not, and are quoted before any work starts:
- renewing the domain after custody ends;
- paid hosting or third-party subscriptions going forward;
- moving the site onto a different hosting platform;
- restoring or securing an old WordPress site — there is no automatic reversion;
- rebuilding forms, analytics or integrations elsewhere;
- custom data conversion; and
- meetings and coordination with your replacement provider.
One practical consequence worth understanding early: before a site goes live we record where the frozen deployment will live if you leave — a host you control or fund. That is agreed at the start precisely so that leaving is a procedure rather than a negotiation.
What custody is not.
Three comparisons, because "website service" covers a lot of very different arrangements:
| It is not… | Because… |
|---|---|
| A one-off build | We do not sell a website and walk away. A build without custody recreates the problem it was meant to solve — an unmaintained site that decays quietly. New builds are sold with custody, never instead of it. |
| A hosting reseller account | Hosting is one line in the list above. The service is the accountability: someone whose job it is to notice, decide and fix. |
| An agency retainer with hours | You are not buying a block of design time. You are buying a site that stays healthy, with a defined and bounded amount of change included. |
Why we publish the boundary.
Writing this down costs us some enquiries. Someone reading the "never included" list will decide custody is not what they wanted, and will not get in touch. That is the intended effect. The alternative is discovering the mismatch after they have paid, which is worse for them and worse for us.
It also sets a standard you can hold any provider to, including us. If a website proposal you are considering does not tell you who owns the source, what happens at exit, and what is outside the fee — ask. The answer, and how readily it arrives, tells you most of what you need to know.
Retrieved from https://amkatechnologies.com/insights/what-website-custody-does-and-does-not
Published 28 July 2026. AMKA Technologies Sdn Bhd, SSM 202301041763 (1535682-T).