KEENE, N.H. (MyKeeneNow) This is the second article in my series about website ownership, and this time I’m focusing on a hidden risk many small businesses overlook: who actually controls the domain name, web hosting and website access.

My first article was about the deed, the land and the building. This time, I’m looking at the harder truth: it doesn’t matter whose name is on the deed if only one aging specialist can unlock the door.

Let me tell you where the keys to a lot of small businesses actually sit.

They sit with me — and with a few thousand people like me.

I know because, for years, I’ve been the person holding those keys: the registrar login, the hosting credentials and the phone that receives the two-factor authentication code when something needs to change. For more clients than I’d like to admit, I am the guy who can get in when nobody else can.

Not because anyone was careless. It’s because that’s how this whole era of the web was built. Websites went up on the backs of hands-on people who don’t just manage the access — they are the access.

That’s fine, right up until it isn’t.

A generation of us is getting older. When one of us retires, moves, stops answering the phone or dies, the logins and the know-how can walk out the door together.

And losing a domain isn’t abstract. The email tied to it can go dark. The website can disappear. A business can suddenly become unreachable at the online address its customers have known for years.

Getting that access back — if you can at all — can mean lawyers, complicated ownership disputes or, in some cases, buying your own name back from whoever grabbed it first. It’s already happening, and as the dinosaurs thin out, the problem is only going to get worse.

Here’s a real case, kept anonymous.

Years ago, I set up a golf course — domain, hosting, the works. I did it well. But the registrar login is still under my control, and the two-factor authentication still lands on my phone.

If I disappeared tomorrow, that client would have a genuine problem accessing the systems that run its entire online presence.

Now multiply that by every specialist in every small town who set up websites for local businesses a decade or two ago.

That’s the slow-motion loss coming.

You never feel this problem on a normal day. It surfaces at the worst possible moment — when you want to switch designers, move to faster hosting, update an email address or sell the business and hand everything over cleanly.

Someone asks for the registrar login, and the room goes quiet.

A change that should take ten minutes turns into a search party for a person who may no longer be reachable.

In my last column, I said: own your domain, know your three layers — the domain is your deed, hosting is your land, and the website is your building — and keep advertising separate.

All of that is still true.

But here’s the addendum I left out: owning the deed doesn’t help if only one person can open the door. And too often, that person isn’t you.

The trap only springs because both sides stay comfortable. The owner never asks who holds the keys. The specialist never volunteers — and, if we’re honest, may quietly enjoy being irreplaceable.

Being the only person who can get in feels like job security. It’s really just risk with your name on it.

So the keys sit in one pocket until the pocket is gone.

Closing that gap takes both sides moving.

If you own the business: Get your name on your domain registration — today. Not your web guy’s account. Yours.

Get your own logins to the registrar and the hosting.

Then ask the person who runs your site one plain question: If you vanished tomorrow, could I get into everything?

If the answer is anything short of a clean yes, you don’t have a technology problem. You have an ownership problem — and it will remain invisible right up until the day it becomes catastrophic.

If you hold the keys: Hand them over.

Document the access. Put the registrar in the client’s name, with the client’s own login. Build a role-based administrator account the organization controls — not a two-factor code tied to one person’s phone.

Name a successor.

Write down where everything lives — registrar, host, DNS and email — on one page the owner keeps.

Making yourself replaceable isn’t a threat to your business. It is the business now.

The professional move in this trade is no longer being the only person who can get in. It’s making sure someone else always can.

I’m taking my own advice, starting with that golf course.

It should have happened years ago.

Own the deed, the land and the building.

Then make sure the keys don’t leave with one man — because someday, one way or another, that man leaves.