How to verify hosting access before sign-off
A practical way to confirm that the agency can really reach and administer the live environment before handover is treated as complete.
Hosting access is one of the most common false signals in handover. Teams often record that the site is live and assume that means the agency can administer the environment when needed.
Five-step check
Identify the actual service that controls the live environment.
Confirm who owns the billing and admin route.
Ask someone on the agency side to log in independently.
Check whether deployment, rollback, and environment settings are reachable.
Record where the access lives and who verified it.
What counts as verified
Someone on the incoming team has actually signed in and confirmed that the route still works.
Not “we were told the login exists”. Not “it worked a few months ago”. Verified means tested, reachable, and recorded.
A live site can be technically delivered while the agency still cannot recover it under pressure.
The first real sign of a hosting gap often appears during an outage, a launch change, or an urgent client request.
That is exactly when a vague access assumption becomes expensive.
How Custody helps
Custody helps agencies turn handover into a visible record of what is missing, what is still externally held, and what has actually been verified.