Own Your Content Means Control, Not Copyright: Run This Test

Own Your Content: A Control Question, Not a Copyright One

Owning your content is a control question, not a copyright one: you own your content when you know where it is kept, can export all of it in a format another tool reads, and can switch the platform off without losing a page. That is the whole answer.

Let’s get one thing straight: “you still own it” is not the same as “you can take it with you.” The first is a legal line in a terms page. The second is something you can test this week, on your own account, without a lawyer.

I’m not your lawyer, and this column gives no legal advice. I am, however, the person who has to know where the database is. Every page and article of every site I run sits in one CMS, a content management system, the admin panel where you write and store what a site shows. That CMS keeps everything in a database I own.

The people searching this phrase are asking a platform question. The first page of results is Quora threads, a Canva piece and a law-firm post, and the questions all sound the same: do I own what I post on WordPress.com, on Squarespace, on Medium, on social media? The WordPress.com campaign Own Your Content asks it best, and its About page notes the stakes: “If Medium disappeared, where would your articles go?”

So here are the three checks this column walks through. Where does it actually sit? Name the host. Name the database. If you can’t, that’s your answer. Can you take all of it out? Not your posts only: the pictures, the pages, the design. And who can switch it off? The platform, an expired card, or an old login you forgot about.

Why the Campaign Asks the Right Question and Then Stops

The Own Your Content campaign is a good place to start, and an odd one. Its About page asks, “If Instagram were deleted tomorrow, what would you do? If Medium disappeared, where would your articles go? How would people find you?” It tells creators to “do it in your own garden, not someone else’s.” I agree with every word.

Now read who is asking. The campaign homepage describes Own Your Content as a campaign from WordPress.com and CreativeMornings. WordPress.com is a hosted platform. It is a fine one, but it is still someone else’s garden in the sense that matters here: their servers, their account, their terms. That does not make the campaign wrong. It means you should read its export page before you believe its pitch.

Squarespace makes the same kind of offer from the other side. Its creator tools page describes one platform for creators. That is the convenience and the concentration in one sentence. One place is easy to use. One place is also one place to lose.

That is the gap in what you will read on this: the campaign and the terms pages cover the licence and the export, but not where your content is kept or who can switch it off. This is where the split the rest of this column depends on comes in. A licence is a legal permission: what the platform is allowed to do with what you upload. Control is practical: where the content is kept, what you can take out, and what happens when the account stops. A platform can be generous on the first and still leave you weak on the second. The campaign asks the right question about control, then answers it with a philosophy. I want a test.

Read the Terms: You Still Own It, and They Get a Licence Forever

Start with the terms, because they answer the legal half fast.

Squarespace’s Terms of Service note it plainly: “When you upload content to Squarespace, you still own it.” Good. Then the same terms give Squarespace a “non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable right and license” to use it. Read that sentence twice. You still own it, and they get a licence that does not end. Both can be true at once, and neither tells you where your content is kept or how you get it back.

WordPress.com follows the same pattern. Its terms, documented by Automattic in the legalmattic repository on GitHub, grant WordPress.com “a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish the Content.” Same shape: you keep it, they can use it.

Is that a scandal? No. A platform needs a licence to show your post to anyone. But it does show what the terms are for. They settle who may use the content. They skip the question you care about the day you want to leave.

And for Medium and the social platforms? The sources behind this column hold no usable export or ownership detail for them, and I will not fill that gap with a guess. If you publish there, read their terms and their export page yourself, with the three checks from the first section in hand.

One more thing worth knowing about the sources: they are terms pages and help pages, not studies. Nobody in this research measured how many people lost content when a platform changed. So treat everything below as a test to run, not a statistic.

The Export Test: Count What Actually Comes Out

Here is what the platforms’ own pages say you get when you leave.

Platform	What the terms say you keep	What the export gives you	What the source warns about
Squarespace	“you still own it”	A WordPress-format .xml file; only one primary blog exports; the site must be published and public, with no export from a trial	On expired sites, “your content may already be deleted”
WordPress.com	A licence to WordPress.com, “worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive”	An XML file with posts, pages, comments, categories, tags and links to media	Theme, customizations and plugins are not exported; the media files are links, not the files
Medium	No usable detail in this research	No usable detail in this research	Check it yourself

The Squarespace help page on how to export your site content is blunt about the limits: “Only one blog page exports.” It notes you can’t export from a trial site. And it warns that on an expired site, “your content may already be deleted.” Only one blog page. That is the number to check before you cancel anything.

Why does that matter? Because the export is the only copy you can carry. If it holds one blog out of three, the other two belong to the platform in every way that counts on the day you leave.

What is at stake is the whole archive, not one post. The campaign’s profile of Khoi Vinh on how his blog amplified his work and career describes a designer who had published on his own blog for nearly 20 years when it ran in 2019. One example, not a trend.

Here is what a count looks like, as an illustration. On the live site, write down four numbers: blog pages, posts, pages and images. Open the export and count the same four. Say the site shows three blog pages and the Squarespace export holds one: that is the one-primary-blog limit, and the other two are not in your file. Say the WordPress.com export lists every post but the images are web addresses still pointing at the old site: that is the links-not-files rule, and the pictures leave with the old site unless you copy them first. Any number that does not match is a piece of your content you do not control yet.

So run the export now, not when you need it. A test you run on a calm day costs you some reading. A test you run on the day the card expires can cost you the archive.

What Our One CMS Holds, Counted

Here is my own answer to the three checks, with the receipts.

I run one CMS behind every site I publish: clevrstart, flowingkhaos, lukesidney.me and the internal docs for my own system. The CMS is Payload, on the same version across every app. My manual puts the rule in one line: “The CMS owns editorial content, not the app.” Pages, articles, categories and media live in the CMS. The design, the routes and the components live in each site’s own code. So a new site is a new front end that reads its own pages from the same place, not a new CMS.

I counted what it holds on 2026-10-16, from the CMS’s own API, published items only:

What it holds	Count (ours)
Published articles, flowingkhaos	11
Published articles, lukesidney	12
Published doc pages, clevrstart	32 (15 of all published doc pages are French)
Published service pages	15
Media files	307
Workshops	3
Fixes	6
Videos	2

One decision matters most for the export test. On 2026-08-04 I decided that an “Article body is a markdown string, not Lexical rich text.” Markdown is plain text with a few marks for headings and links. Any other tool can read it. If I left this CMS tomorrow, every article would come out as a text file, not as a format only this admin panel understands.

Where does it sit? In one Postgres database I own, next to my clients, quotes, invoices and bookings. Every client, quote, invoice, booking and article of ours sits in one database we own. The clevrstart guide to a single source of truth describes the same rule for business data: store each thing once, in one database you own. My column on why I put everything in one database, Second Brain for Business, explains the longer story.

This is my setup, and it is the answer I would want from any platform. I’m not telling you to copy it.

Compute Moved, Data Stayed: What the Move Cost and What Broke

If you own the database, you do not automatically own the computer the CMS runs on. Those are two different decisions, and the move made me face the second one.

Item	Before	After
Where the CMS runs	A Vercel project	One container on Railway, since 2026-09-16
Where the content sits	The cms section of the one Postgres database, on Neon	Unchanged: the same section, the same database
Why it moved	The CMS used 22.2% of the account’s Fluid Active CPU (Vercel dashboard, Jul 31 to Aug 29)	Not read yet on Railway

The reason was measured, not felt. Fluid Active CPU is the compute time an app actually spends working. Over Jul 31 to Aug 29, the Vercel dashboard showed the CMS at 22.2% of the account’s share, and the old flowingkhaos app at 32.5%. Two apps held 54.7%, and deploys were refused for a day at a time across every app on the account. My fix write-up, Vercel Hobby could not carry the CMS, reports the whole move, and its rule is the one I keep: “Measure which project spends before you move anything.”

The cost, kept short. Railway’s published pricing for its Hobby plan is 5 USD a month with 5 USD of usage included. The whole setup at idle is about 13 to 19 USD a month, and that is an estimate. Neon cost 0 USD, measured. The first Railway bill is not read yet. The rule that would reverse the move: if the Railway project’s usage goes over 25 USD a month for two months in a row, I measure both hosts again before choosing.

Here is the point for you. The computer changed. The content did not move: the database stayed where it was. Only the second of those is about owning your content. If your platform is both the computer and the database, you cannot make that split. You move everything or nothing.

The Door I Left Open: An Old Admin Copy and a Wrong Publish

Here is the failure that no export test catches.

Every admin door counts. An old copy that still has admin access can change what your readers see, and an export file will not show it. List every login and every copy that can publish.

After the move, the old Vercel copy of the CMS stayed reachable. It was a second admin panel, still connected to the live database. On 2026-09-26 I published from it by mistake. The old copy was deleted that day.

Look at what it shows. I owned the database. I had the export. Every check in this column so far would have passed. And there was still a second door into my content that I had stopped counting.

That is the quieter risk of owning your content: not the platform you rent, but the copies of your own system that still hold admin access. An old staging site. A plugin with publish rights. A login you gave a contractor two years ago. Each one is a way to change what your readers see, and none of them shows up in an export file.

The fix is boring, which is the point. List every place that can publish to your site, and every person who can log in to it. If a door is not on the list, close it. If you cannot make the list, that is the same answer as not knowing where the database is.

The Ownership Test You Can Run on Your Platform This Week

Here is the test, built from the platforms’ own pages and from the mistake above. This is a test for you to run, not one I measured on any platform.

1. Find the storage. Name the host and the database where your content sits. If you cannot name them, write that down. It is your first answer.
2. Export now, not when you need it. Check the platform’s rules first. Squarespace needs a published, public site, and it does not export from a trial.
3. Count what came out. Compare the export with what you see on the platform. On WordPress.com, count your media library too, because the WordPress.com export file carries links to your media, not the files.
4. Separate the design. The WordPress.com export leaves out the theme, customizations and plugins. Plan your design as a separate rebuild, not part of the export.
5. Check what expires. Read what happens when a payment fails or a plan ends. Squarespace warns that on an expired site your content may already be deleted.
6. List every admin login and who can publish. Include old copies, plugins and past helpers. Close what you do not use.

If something goes wrong on the way, the Fixes section of this site is where my own write-ups live, the Vercel Hobby one included. The next columns in this series, What our software stack costs a month and Grow from structure before you buy clients, are live too.

The platform you pick matters less than your answers to those six questions. If you can name where your content is, take all of it out in a format another tool reads, and switch the platform off without losing a page, you own your content in the way that counts. I could be wrong about your platform. Run the test and see.

Sources

• About – Own Your Content - WordPress.com
• Own Your Content – Own Your Content is a campaign from WordPress.com & CreativeMornings, encouraging creatives to own their content, platform, and the future of their work.
• Khoi Vinh on How His Blog Amplified His Work and Career – Own Your Content
• Creator Tools – Own Your Content
• Terms of Service — Squarespace
• Export your site content – Squarespace Help Center
• Export WordPress Content | WordPress.com Support
• legalmattic/Terms of Service/WordPress.com/EN-Terms-of-Service.md at master · Automattic/legalmattic · GitHub
• How to centralize your business data
• Why I put my whole business in one database
• What our software stack costs a month
• Grow from structure before you buy clients
• Fixes
• Second Brain for Business: Why I Put Everything in One Database — the column