My in-laws have a business website that was designed for them for an initial cost. The company that built the website also hosts it. The package that they supply costs £30 per month. However, my in-laws don’t require any of the services they provide, except for the hosting. Obviously, they would like to simply host the website elsewhere for a fraction of the cost. Reading the T&Cs of the company that designed the website suggests that they own the IP, so this would not be possible – does this sound correct?

quite possible, if the company designed and implemented the site

I guess you are referring to intellectual property and not Internet Protocol address.

There is a good chance that they do own the Intellectual Property, you would have to review the initial contract that was signed for agreement.

If the contract says they own the IP…

Yes, IP as in Intellectual Property.

I’ve not seen the actual contract. Unfortunately my in-laws are clueless regarding the whole thing, so have no idea what they’ve signed up for. Hopefully they still have a copy of the contract.

We just had a company approach us as a charity offering a ‘funding service’ to deliver a ‘free’ website to all charities, ‘linking up web design professionals and the third sector’.
No such thing.
They do a basic one page wordpress site (likely in India), you populate it, they own the Intellectual Property, and overcharge a monthly fee for the next few years, on a vague increasing cost basis. 😯

£30 for hosting a business website is about fair I would say anyway – why do they want to move the hosting to somewhere ‘at a fraction of the cost’? Do they realise that they might just be buying themselves lots of hassle with downtimes, lack of support etc – there are many considerations for professional hosting other than simply cost.

And in answer to your OP, yes it is possible (and quite likely) that the original web designers hold the IP – we state that in our contracts. However, if a client wanted to move to another provider we wouldn’t charge them *UNLESS* they used that site as a framework to build other sites.

The business is a holiday cottage. The website is a simple static site with a contact form – no online booking system, no e-commerce. They don’t require any updates to content or any additional support. As such, there really is no reason to be paying that much.

I haven’t spoken to the company involved yet, just trying to work out where they stand before I do.

£30 is quite reasonable if they actually change the site at all, and they should even if it’s just keeping content fresh.

Depends entirely on what the country contract says, if the design company is smart / agressive the contract will say they own the Intellectual Property of the design – more long term £££ for them

They haven’t changed the website at all in the five years that they’ve had it. If they did want to make changes, then they have to do it themselves through the company’s CMS. The company involved were also trying to get them to pay an additional fee to optimise the website for phone viewing.

qtip – Member
They haven’t changed the website at all in the five years that they’ve had it. If they did want to make changes, then they have to do it themselves through the company’s CMS. The company involved were also trying to get them to pay an additional fee to optimise the website for phone viewing.

Content is always up to the customer to create/add/maintain.

5 years is a long time in the internet. There have been many changes in that time which would be chargeable to bring a 5 year old website up to date. Responsive websites (optimised for smaller devices) are the norm now, but a website 5 years ago, particularly a small business website, might not have been built to be responsive.

FWIW, it’s absolutely worth paying for the site to be responsive. If that costs more than the cost of building a new site elsewhere… well thats a decision you need to make. But in 2017 having a responsive website is absolutely critical.

The web agency owns all code & possibly design if they did the design for you also.

through the company’s CMS

They won’t be able to do that if the site’s hosted on different servers.

It’s a database driven set of pages – unless you have the whole CMS running on the server hosting it they won’t have a site. If their current hosts have carried out any customisation of the code then I can understand their IP thing.

Tbh, if it’s half a dozen static pages I’d pay someone else a few hundred quid and get a wordpress theme running they like and the content rekeyed and go from there.

FWIW, it’s absolutely worth paying for the site to be responsive. If that costs more than the cost of building a new site elsewhere… well thats a decision you need to make. But in 2017 having a responsive website is absolutely critical.

And on top of that, Google negatively score non-responsive websites

through the company’s CMS

They won’t be able to do that if the site’s hosted on different servers.
Unless it is just WordPress or similar and they simply say it is their CMS

I only pay £15 a year for hosting with TSOHOST for a simple WordPress site I did myself. A lot of WordPress themes are responsive, (i.e. change according to whether you’re viewing from a mobile, tablet or PC) and may not require any additional work.

As wwaswas said for only a few pages on a straight forward site I’d consider moving rather than being locked in

When it comes to IP, there should be distinctions between the content of the website (i.e. text, images, video), the visual design, and the code it runs on. IANAL.

I’m also not a web designer, but I do make my own sites+wordpress themes, and a close relation is a commercial web developer. It sounds like whatever package they’ve sold your in-laws is overkill and they’ve turned them into a source of passive income. If the website is basically just an advert with contact info/form, and they’re not doing e-commerce or anything, then hosting can be a lot cheaper than £30 a month. It only took me a couple of days to learn how to make that kind of site.

OTOH, a static site that small is the kind of job that clients can turn into a complete pain in the arse, and a lot of seasoned web developers won’t touch it. Unless you’re just bunging wordpress and an existing theme up for people, doing design work for the low £100’s can become a massive amount of work, admin, sales etc. for tiny returns.

They are being fleeced at £30/month for the site you describe.

Get them to ask the provider what they feel they’re doing to justify that price, and what they need to do to transfer to TSO host.

If the provider get awkward, can you build them a WordPress site?

When it comes to IP, there should be distinctions between the content of the website (i.e. text, images, video), the visual design, and the code it runs on. IANAL.

Well it is down to the individual contract. For example, some photographers continue to own the IP of the images they take even if it is of you. You might be able to buy a print from them for X or buy the rights to the image for Y but they may still own the IP so they are able to use that image for promotional purposes – if you wanted to own it outright they may charge you Z.

Yep, the contract could say absolutely anything regarding those types of IP. If it’s one they hired a solicitor to write, it’ll be pretty bulletproof. If they wrote it themselves with no experience of contract law, then a solicitor could probably shoot it full of holes in no time.

(I think what you outline is the legal default for photographs too – most photogs and illustrators I’ve hired charge a one off fee and grant a perpetual license to use the imagery in certain ways, and any other use requires renegotiation).

They are being fleeced at £30/month for the site you describe.

Why? The cheapest hosting we do is £19.99 + VAT a month – and that site would be sat on a shared server (private one to our organisation). So in my opinion £30 isn’t silly money for a professional site.

However, if it is on a massive shared server with no guaranteed uptime then it is silly money.

So in my opinion £30 isn’t silly money for a professional site.

It’s silly money for a site that’s half a dozen static pages that haven’t changed in five years, no matter how “professional” that may be. They’ve been been charged £1800 for web hosting that they could’ve got elsewhere for well under £100.

To be honest depends on what they’re getting for their £30 pcm.

Regardless of the number of pages/traffic/changes if the site is on a secure dedicated server shared only by other clients of the designer/developer then that is a fair price with substantial benefits to your in-laws.

If they’re on a resold 123-reg (or similar) package then yes, they’re getting fleeced.

The company involved were also trying to get them to pay an additional fee to optimise the website for phone viewing.

Good – advise them to do this.

To be honest depends on what they’re getting for their £30 pcm.

[quote] half a dozen static pages that haven’t changed in five years[/quote]

I’d just bin the lot and build a new website using WordPress. Just need to see if you can transfer the url

If they’re paying for domain, then yes its transferrable. if its a site off the providers site (eg http://www.fleecemISP.com/joebloggsholidays), then no.

^ in that case I’d buy joebloggsholidays.uk or similar as well.

Squarespace might be worth looking at:
https://www.squarespace.com

Gets expensive for people running multiple websites, but for just one it does everything many people need with a friendly interface and a monthly charge much lower than your in-laws are paying. If freelancers approach my brother asking him to build them a portfolio site, that’s where he sends them.

I used to own a web agency

We retained the IP as ‘blocks’ of code were often re-used (before WP templates) the contract protected us from a client claiming IP on the code and then preventing us from using/ reusing or trying to license.

In reality if a client had a static page if they wanted to migrate it to save on hosting we wouldn’t have had a problem.

Why not just call them up and ask ?

If they a re going to be difficult just bin the 5 year old site and make a WP one from templates