Who actually holds your website
Nobody asks this at the start, and everybody wishes they had later. If you and I fell out tomorrow, what would you actually walk away with?
A website feels like one thing, the way an outfit does. It’s three, and they can be held by three different people.
There’s the domain, the address people type. There’s the files, the actual site, every page and picture and line of code. And there’s the place those files are served from. Hold all three and you own a website. Hold one of them and you have a hostage situation you haven’t noticed yet.
So here’s how I do it, mostly so you can see what the pieces look like when they’re kept separate.
The files live in a repository on GitHub, which is really just a folder that remembers every version of itself. Every change I have ever made is kept, with a note about what it was, so the site can be put back to any day of its life. GitHub’s free plan gives you unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators, so keeping the entire history of your site costs nothing at all.
The site is served by Cloudflare. When a change lands in the repository, Cloudflare rebuilds and publishes it, usually inside a minute. The free plan allows five hundred of those rebuilds a month, about seventeen a day, and handing the finished files out to visitors is free and unlimited on every plan they offer. A busy month costs exactly what a quiet one does.
The domain stays in your name with your card on it. This is the one I would insist on even if you never worked with me. A domain sitting in your designer’s account is one of the easier ways to lose control of a site you paid for.
Now the honest half.
- The way in is the file itself. If you know what you are looking at you can open the page in GitHub, change 5pm to 4pm, and the site rebuilds on its own. That part is genuinely easy. What you are editing is the raw page though, where a misplaced character breaks the layout and nothing stops you doing it. That is why I build a backend, so a change is a box you type into rather than a file you can damage.
- It is not as cohesive as Wix or Squarespace. With those, the editor, the hosting, the domain and the bill all sit behind one login. Here the files live in one place and the serving happens in another. If we ever part ways you inherit two accounts rather than one. All of it is recoverable and none of it is locked, but there is no single door with your name on it.
- I am not a support desk. Squarespace and Wix keep people on a roster, so there will be hours when they are reachable and I am not. That is the real cost and I am not going to dress it up. The trade is what happens when you do reach me. I have sat in those queues myself, explaining a site to somebody seeing it for the first time. Here you get the person who built it, just not at three in the morning.
- The ground moves. Cloudflare has started telling people to build new sites on a different product to the one this site runs on. That is the company I chose quietly suggesting I change.
That last one should be the argument against all of it. It is the opposite, and it is the whole point of this piece.
When the platform under a Squarespace site changes, you change with it, because your site is made of Squarespace. When the platform under this one changes, I move the files. The site is not made of Cloudflare. It is made of files that Cloudflare happens to hand out, and files can be handed out from somewhere else by dinner.
So here is what you are actually buying.
No monthly platform fee, because at the size your business is the hosting is free. Nothing to patch, because there is no software running, only files being served. No database to break into and no plugins to keep updated, which closes off most of the ways a small business site gets taken over. And every version kept, so a bad change is a five minute fix rather than a bad week.
Ownership is not a feeling. It is a list you can check. Your domain, in your name. Your files, somewhere you can reach them. A host you are free to leave.
If you cannot name all three for your own site, that is worth an afternoon.
More from the notebook soon. x