Planning an exit: what you should be able to take with you

Work out how you would leave a host before you sign up, not on the day you want to go. Pre-sales answers that question because it wants your order; a billing queue hearing it from a customer who has already given notice has much less reason to hurry. Portability is also cheap to verify while everything is calm. If you can take a complete copy of your own material today, in a form somebody else can read, you stay free every month afterwards. That test applies to us exactly as it applies to anyone else.

What portability actually requires

1. A full copy of your files and databases, on demand, in ordinary formats. A backup restorable only by the panel that made it is a safety net, not an exit. You want to pull down an archive of the document root and a plain SQL dump whenever you choose, without a ticket and without a charge attached to the request.
2. Registrar control of your own domain names. The account should be in your name with your address on the record. Names registered as a favour during setup end up inside somebody else's account, and that detail stalls more exits than any technical problem.
3. Transfer authorisation without friction. You should be able to unlock a name and read its authorisation code yourself, in minutes. A retention offer is fair game; making the code conditional on a phone call is not. The sequence and timings are set out under domain transfers.
4. Mail you can copy message by message. IMAP access to every mailbox, so a desktop client or sync tool can move the contents across. Files can be copied twice if the first attempt is wrong. A mailbox left on a cancelled account cannot be recovered at any price.
5. No dependency without an equivalent elsewhere. A caching layer with a name nobody outside the provider uses, a page builder whose output only its own runtime serves, a locally compiled database extension. Each is a piece of your site that must be rewritten before it runs elsewhere.

Things that genuinely do not travel

Prove it in your first month

1. Download one full archive and one database dump, then restore both somewhere local. If either step needs staff help, you have your answer.
2. Log in to the registrar directly. Confirm the contact address is yours and locate where the authorisation code is issued.
3. Copy one mailbox over IMAP into a client on your own machine.
4. Write down every feature you rely on that has no name outside this provider. That list is your real switching cost.

Reading the answer

Some constraints are legitimate and should not count against a host. A newly transferred or newly amended domain sits under a sixty day registrar transfer restriction that no provider can waive, and a stated data retention window after cancellation is a policy, not an obstacle. What should worry you is a fee for your own export, an authorisation code released only by a human, or a panel with no way to get the database out.

A provider confident in its service loses nothing by making the door easy to find, because customers who can leave any week and do not are the only ones whose staying means anything. Hold us to the same standard: if any of the four checks above is awkward on our platform, tell us and expect an answer that names the constraint.