I have seen too many brands discover at the worst possible moment that their site did not belong to them. They thought they owned it, they were renting. The difference does not show day to day. It gets paid the day you want to leave.
The invisible rent
A site built on a closed platform is not yours. You occupy a spot. The day the price goes up, the platform changes its rules, removes a feature or disappears, you take nothing with you. Your pages live in a format nobody else knows how to read. Migrating means rebuilding everything. It is written nowhere in plain words, but that is the contract.
The domain first
The domain name is the only asset you truly own. Everything should hang off it: the site, the email, the identity. A domain of your own, at a neutral registrar, and the rest can move without breaking anything. It is the first decision in a project. It is rarely taken seriously, probably because it costs a few euros a year and looks like nothing at all.
Files, not a captive database
My stance: a site that rests on text files, versioned, hostable anywhere. Astro compiles everything to static HTML. The content lives in Markdown, in your git repository. Changing host takes an hour. Nothing is held prisoner, not even by me: another developer can pick the project up tomorrow, everything is readable. Owning your site is not a slogan, it is an architecture.
Renting stays comfortable at the start, I will not pretend otherwise. Owning simply takes one technical choice, made at the right moment. That choice is mine by default.
