For about ten years, my portfolio lived at a hyphenated version of my own name, on one of the big website builders. The builder held the domain, the hosting, the templates, and the ceiling. Every month a small fee went out, and in exchange I had a site that looked professional, never went down, and never quite did what I wanted.
This year I moved out. Not because the old site failed. It never failed. That was the deal, and the deal worked. I moved out because the reason the deal ever made sense had quietly disappeared.
It is worth being fair about what that deal was. When I signed up, a custom website meant tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of your own hours, and it started rotting the day it shipped unless a developer stayed on retainer. Against that, a monthly fee for something polished was not a trap. It was a bargain. The builders were never a scam. They were a loan against the cost of building, and for twenty years the cost of building justified almost any interest rate.
The interest was real, though. You paid it in small refusals, and they were easy to dismiss one at a time. The section that could only be what the template imagined. The markup you could not touch. The speed score you could not fix. The file you could not place where a system expected to find it. This spring I turned down a whole piece of client work, measurement plumbing on a site that lived inside a builder, because the platform would fight every step and the honest answer was to move the site instead. None of these moments feel like a landlord saying no. Platforms rarely say no. They say almost, indefinitely.
Then the thing the loan was borrowing against got cheap. My new site is my own code in my own repository, on my own domain, and it went up in a stretch of evenings with AI doing the heavy lifting. Hosting costs about as much as a coffee. A change deploys in a minute. There is no plan to upgrade, because there is no plan. The math that held for twenty years flipped in one: the fee used to be cheaper than building, and now building is cheaper than the fee.
What surprised me was not the savings. It was what ownership turned out to include. Every layer of the site is reachable now, and it matters more each month, because the readers of a website are no longer just people. Machines read it, summarize it, and repeat what they find, and writing for them happens in exactly the layers a rented platform keeps locked: the markup, the structured data, the plain files at the root of the domain. On the builder I could change my fonts. I could not change what a machine believed my site was. There is a difference between decorating a room and owning the walls, and the difference shows up the day you want to do something the landlord never imagined.
The site does more now, too. It grows tools when I need them: pages that collect real feedback, forms that route into my own systems, small machines bolted on wherever the work calls for one. A rented site is a brochure with a paint kit. An owned site is a place where software can accumulate.
I want to be careful with the conclusion, because the easy version is wrong. Plenty of people should keep renting. If a site is genuinely a brochure, if nobody will ever need the locked layers, if there is no one around to care for a codebase, the fee is still a fine deal, and the builders do real work for it. The point is narrower and, I think, sharper: the default flipped. For twenty years, renting was the sensible choice and ownership was the luxury, reserved for whoever could afford to build. Now ownership costs a few evenings, and the rent is what you pay to not have to care. That can still be worth it. But it is a different purchase than it used to be, and it deserves to be made on purpose.
The hyphenated version of my name still exists. It forwards here now, to a domain I hold, from a landlord I no longer have. I am not bitter about the decade. The loan was right for a world where building was expensive, and I used every bit of the convenience I paid for. But that world is over, and when it ended I did what you do when the lease runs out on a place you have outgrown.
I kept the name.