Industry standards will prevail in a dispute and these are: (1) unless you paid a boatload of money for a custom design, you won’t own rights to your design (even a boatload of money is not a guarantee); (2) your content is always yours, but you better be sure that you’re backing it up on a regular basis to an off-site space that you control in case there is a dispute with your host/designer; (3) blogrolls and other widgets are not “design” — they are more like “content,” but unless they are tied to a third party (as in external to your blog) service, you’re going to have a hard time taking them to a new blog host; (4) do not EVER let your designer/host register and/or control your dn — it is too easy for unscrupulous hosts to hold the name hostage (register at GoDaddy and point the name to your host); and (5) the scope and breadth of the agreement you can expect are probably directly correlated to the expense of the subscription — many web hosts run on the cheap to be competitive and the agreement, if there is one, is going to be thin.

If you can get a detailed contract, great. If you can’t, be aware of industry standards and allocate your risks accordingly. Allocating risks should be easy enough for a lawyer, right?