Essays
What Owning a Website Used to Mean, and What It Could Mean Again
For about fifteen years, owning a website has meant renting one. The bargain was reasonable when the alternative was hard. Two things have changed, and the question worth asking now, as your next annual renewal comes around, is whether the bargain still is.
26 May 2026 · 5 min read · By Sophie Kazandjian
For about fifteen years, owning a website has meant renting one. That bargain was reasonable when the alternative was hard. Two things have changed.
You signed up for Squarespace or Wix or Webflow or Shopify, picked a template, dropped in your text and pictures, and pointed your domain at the result. The site was yours in the sense that you'd written the words and chosen the photographs. It wasn't yours in any other sense. You couldn't move it. You couldn't see how it was built. You couldn't keep it running if the company decided you shouldn't. You were paying monthly rent on a shop you'd dressed yourself.
This arrangement was reasonable for a long time, because the alternative was hard. Writing a website by hand meant knowing HTML and CSS, learning how DNS worked, figuring out hosting, dealing with the tedious middle layer of FTP and SSL certificates and database backups. Most small business owners reasonably decided this was not their problem. They paid the rent and got on with their actual work.
The arrangement is starting to look different now, because two things have changed at once.
What AI just made possible
The first change is that AI has done to web development what it's done to a lot of other knowledge work. The technical barrier that used to keep small business owners out of building their own sites has collapsed. A non-technical person can describe the site they want to Claude or a similar tool and get clean, well-built HTML and CSS back. They can drop the file onto Cloudflare Pages or Netlify, point their domain at it, and have a live site in an afternoon. The thing that used to take a developer a week now takes a conversation. None of this requires learning to code. It requires being able to describe what you want.
The work that used to be locked behind technical skill is now accessible through plain language. The skill that counts has moved. It used to be writing the code. Now it's knowing what you want the site to do and being able to say so clearly.
The landlord problem
The second change is harder to see day to day and goes deeper. The hosted platforms have started behaving the way hosted platforms eventually do. Prices creep up. Editors change in ways that break the muscle memory you'd built over five years. Features you used quietly disappear into higher tiers. Templates you liked get retired. Customer support routes through chatbots that don't read what you wrote. The bundle that used to feel like a fair trade starts to feel like something else.
Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification: the slow pattern by which platforms first court their users, then exploit them once they're locked in, then exploit them harder once the lock-in is deep enough that leaving costs more than staying. He was writing about social networks, but the shape applies to any business built on switching costs. The platform's incentive, once you're committed, is to extract more from you while giving you less, up to whatever line you'll tolerate.
This is not a moral failing of any particular company. It's a structural property of renting your shopfront from a landlord whose business model is finding out how much you'll pay before you leave.
Moving, in practical terms
This is not for everyone. If you run a busy e-commerce site with a thousand SKUs and a custom checkout, you're locked in for good structural reasons, and Shopify earns its rent. But if your site is a handful of pages that describe what you do, how to reach you, and what you charge, the lock-in is no longer structural. It's just inertia. You stay because moving feels like a project, not because moving is actually hard.
Here is what moving actually looks like for that kind of site. You ask an AI to build you a static version of your existing pages. You review the result, change the bits you don't like, refine the design. You drag the resulting file or folder into Cloudflare Pages. You update the DNS at your registrar. The site is live. The whole sequence is a few hours of work, once, and then nothing. No monthly bill. No editor to log into. No platform to manage your relationship with. The site exists as a folder on your computer and a copy on a free hosting service, and if you ever want to move that folder somewhere else, you can.
Who actually moves
This is not a DIY pitch. The AI revolution has lowered the floor, but it hasn't removed the work. Most small business owners I work with don't want to write prompts or manage DNS records or test things on mobile. They want their website to work and stop costing them money. The shift isn't that everyone becomes their own web developer. It's that the work that used to require a developer at developer rates now takes a few hours of someone's afternoon. The price ceiling on small static sites has come down accordingly.
Why a folder beats an account
A folder of HTML on your hard drive is yours in a way that a Squarespace account never quite was. If the host you're using changes its terms, you move the folder. If a new free host appears that you prefer, you move the folder. If you want to mirror the site to three different providers for resilience, you can. If the host goes bankrupt next year, your site doesn't disappear with it. None of these are theoretical concerns. Hosts have raised prices, changed terms, gone under, suspended accounts for reasons their users disagreed with, and quietly broken features that mattered to people. The protection against this is not picking a better landlord. It's owning the file.
For about fifteen years, that kind of ownership was something only technical people could practically have. AI has changed who counts as technical enough. The rest of us made a reasonable bargain and rented our shops from companies that, for a while, were fair landlords. The bargain was rational at the time. The question worth asking now, as your next annual renewal comes around, is whether the bargain still is.