Why every Lutheis site is hosted, and what you own

Your content is yours. The design made for you is yours. The underlying implementation, the code, the components, the database structure, the infrastructure it runs on, is not, and the hosting accounts stay in the studio's name for as long as the studio hosts the site. Your domain is the exception and is registered to you.

That is one arrangement out of several possible ones, and it is a real trade rather than a free lunch. What you give up is the ability to walk off with the machinery. What you get is a site that somebody else is responsible for keeping alive, which for most small businesses is worth considerably more.

Until the middle of 2026 a client could take the files and run the site themselves, and that was the cheaper choice. It was removed on purpose, and the reason is worth being blunt about: it was the cheap option, so it attracted exactly the buyers least equipped to take it.

A non-technical owner who accepts a folder of files and a list of accounts to open has not saved money. They have deferred a cost, and it usually arrives as a bill from somebody else, or as a site that quietly stops receiving security updates until something goes wrong. Meanwhile the studio ends up answering questions about a site it is no longer paid to look after, which is a bad arrangement pretending to be a generous one.

So there is now one delivery model. Every site is built, hosted and maintained by the studio. The price of the build says what the build costs, and the subscription says what running it costs, and neither one is hiding inside the other.

Your content, all of it. Every text, image, logo, video and piece of data you supply, and everything you later add through the CMS, stays yours. The studio holds only the rights it needs to build, host, display, back up and maintain the site, and only for as long as it is doing those things.

The design made for you, on full payment of the build price. That is an exclusive right to use it for your business, worldwide, with no time limit: the layout, the colour palette, the typography and the original visuals produced for you. A design ordered from the collection is marked sold when you buy it and is never offered to another client again, which is what makes "exclusive" mean something rather than being a word in a brochure.

Your domain name. It is registered in your name from the start, it is the one account you hold yourself, and it is not affected by anything else in the arrangement. If invoices go unpaid and the site is eventually taken down, the domain is still yours.

The source code, the components, the frameworks and libraries, the database structure and the infrastructure configuration remain the studio's property. You acquire the right to have your site built and run on that implementation. You do not acquire the implementation.

The practical consequence is narrow and worth stating rather than hiding: the studio stays free to use its own components and solutions on other projects. It does not mean your design is reused, because that is covered separately and the design is exclusively yours. It means the underlying machinery is a studio's tooling rather than a thing sold once per client, which is true of essentially every studio and honest of very few.

The hosting and database accounts are held and operated in the studio's name while it hosts the site. If you have read that sentence somewhere and felt uneasy, that instinct is correct and deserves an answer rather than reassurance, which is the next section.

Hosting and Care is 49 € a month, or 539 € a year, and it starts on the day the site goes live rather than on the day you order. It covers the hosting and the availability of the services the site runs on, security updates and updates to the software the site depends on, backups and restoring the site from one, SSL certificates and DNS and domain configuration, keeping the content management system working, and fixing anything that worked at delivery and has stopped.

It deliberately covers no change work at all. New pages or sections, layout changes, design changes, new features: none of that is maintenance, and pretending otherwise is how a maintenance fee becomes an argument about what counts. Changing the text and the images on your existing pages needs nobody, because every site includes a CMS and you do that yourself, whenever you like, at no cost. Changing what the site is has its own price and is ordered as such.

The studio may still do a small thing for free, and doing so creates no entitlement to the next one. That is written into the contract rather than left implied, because a favour that becomes an expectation is how goodwill turns into a dispute.

You can leave at any time. Migration to accounts you hold yourself can be requested whenever you want. It is quoted individually and has no list price, because what it involves genuinely depends on the site, on how much data it holds and on where it is going. A migration transfers the files, the database and the content, and hands over or helps you recreate the hosting and database accounts in your own name. Your content and your design transfer in every case.

What does not change is the implementation: you keep the right to go on running your own site on it, with no time limit, and you do not acquire the right to resell it. That is the same line as before, drawn in the same place, which is the test of whether a contract means what it said the first time.

And the harder question, the one nobody enjoys asking a one-person studio. If the studio ceases operating, or cannot host your site for more than sixty consecutive days, you can require the accounts and a full export of your site and its data be transferred to accounts you hold, free of charge, and your right to keep running the site continues indefinitely. A decision to stop hosting comes with ninety days' written notice and an offer of that transfer.

One clause matters more than the rest of that paragraph and it is easy to skim past. The studio keeps a current record of the accounts, the access and the steps that transfer needs, specifically so that it can be carried out even if the studio is not personally able to carry it out. A promise of continuity that only works while the person making it is available is not a continuity promise. This is the question to press hardest on with any small supplier, and most of them have no answer to it at all.

Worth knowing before it is ever relevant, because the shape of it is the real measure of how a hosting arrangement treats you. An unpaid invoice gets an email and a further fourteen days. After that the site can be taken offline, with notice before and on the day, and nothing is deleted at that point. Pay within ninety days and it comes back exactly as it was, at no extra cost.

Only after those ninety days can the hosted site, its database, its content and its backups be permanently deleted, with at least fourteen days' warning first, and you can ask for an export of your content at any point during that window. Your domain is untouched throughout.

Notice what the shape of that is: a long series of warnings and an exit that leaves you holding your own content. A hosting arrangement is worth judging on what it does on your worst month, not on your first one.

Ask what transfers to you on final payment, and get the answer in writing. Expect it to be nuanced. "You own everything" is a red flag rather than a generous offer, because it is almost never true of the underlying code and a studio saying it either has not thought about it or is telling you what you want to hear.

Ask in whose name the hosting accounts are held, and what happens to them if you leave.

Ask what the recurring fee covers and, more revealing, what it explicitly does not. A studio that cannot draw that line before you sign will be drawing it during an argument later.

Ask what happens if they stop trading, and listen for whether the answer depends on them personally being there to help.

Ask whether the design can be sold to somebody else afterwards.