A press of your own

Delete a Tumblr blog, and thirty days later the name goes back into circulation. Anyone can take it. Not a blank page where your writing used to be, and not a note saying where you went. Somebody else’s blog, at the address you shared and potentially printed on the back of every copy you ever handed out.

That rule is written down in Tumblr’s own help pages, and by industry standards Tumblr is being unusually straightforward by publishing it. Most platforms don’t say what happens to the name you had on their service after you leave. Where forwarding is offered at all, it lasts as long as you keep paying, and the help pages say nothing about the day you stop. WordPress.com is the honest exception: it sells the forwarding as a product, for about thirteen euros a year, as long as you keep buying it.

The usual advice is to own the whole stack: run your own server, host it yourself, depend on nobody. That is a lot to ask of somebody who only wants to publish.

Own one thing instead, and it is not the software, the server or the mailing list. It is the address. Own that and every other decision stays reversible. The platform, the software and the list are all suppliers you can change, and most of what follows is about choosing them on how easily you can.

What an address actually is

On a platform your address is usually a name sitting inside theirs: example.substack.com, or medium.com/example. That string is what ends up in someone’s bookmarks, on the back page of an issue, in a library catalogue, and in the search box eighteen months later when a stranger half-remembers you.

The alternative is a name of your own: example.com. That is a domain, and you rent it from the organisation that keeps the register for that ending, through a registrar, which is really just a shop that does the paperwork. Porkbun, Namecheap, Gandi, your existing web host. In 2026 a .com runs somewhere between ten and twenty euros a year depending on where you buy it, and nobody asks what you plan to put there. Check the renewal price rather than the first-year one: the gap between them is where registrars make their money.

Once the name is yours, you decide what it points at. Point example.com at Substack today, at a WordPress site in two years, at a single page saying you’ve stopped in ten. Same name every time, so nobody has to be told anything.

Nearly all of them will let you put that name on the front. Ghost and Beehiiv include it, Substack charges fifty dollars once, and the setup is two lines of configuration you copy from their help page. Your name on the door, their machinery behind it.

Why the address is the part that matters

Because it’s the thing that lets you leave without starting again.

Say you spend three years publishing at example.substack.com. You write two hundred pieces. Other people link to them, a few get shared around, some end up in reading lists and library catalogues and other people’s bibliographies. Your readers have the address in their bookmarks. It might even be on the back of a printed issue you publish.

Then something changes and you want to move. The writing you can take, mostly. The address you cannot, so all two hundred of those links now point at a page somebody else decides what to do with. You start again from nothing and spend a year telling people where you went, and some of them never find out.

Now, say you spent those same three years at example.com, with Substack running the site behind it. You want to move. You change where the name points. It takes an afternoon of setting up redirects. Every old link still works, because the links were always to your name and not to theirs. Your readers don’t notice, and mostly shouldn’t have to.

Same writing, same platform, same three years. The difference is about fifteen euros a year and one decision made at the start. The address is the one thing you can’t rebuild, so it’s the one thing to hold. Everything else you can pick on the merits.

Then choose a platform, and choose based on what you can take out

With the address settled, picking a platform becomes a much smaller decision, and you can pick on the thing that actually matters over time: how much of your work it lets you take with you.

Can you get the writing out, and does everything come with it?

Most platforms have a button that packs up what you’ve written and hands it back as a file, and what lands in that file varies wildly. Tumblr is generous: you get your drafts and your private posts, not only the things you published. But the page design goes in the bin with the blog, and it was never in the file to begin with, so whatever you spent a weekend getting right in 2019 exists nowhere except in a screenshot, if you took one.

Medium hands you your articles as web pages and keeps the pictures. What you get is a line of code pointing back at Medium’s servers where each image used to load from. Open the file on a train with no signal and you will see exactly what you own.

So don’t ask whether there’s an export. Ask what comes out of it. Run one on your first day, before you have anything to lose, unzip it and look: are the pictures in there, are your drafts, is anyone’s name attached to anything. Ten minutes, and it tells you more than the feature list ever will.

Can you get your readers out, and what’s actually in the file?

No two platforms mean the same thing by this. Substack gives you a list of email addresses. Its own help pages say you can’t take your subscribers’ names, which for a lot of people is most of the relationship.

Patreon goes furthest. Its rules say that if you leave, you delete the list it gave you and stop using it. Names, email addresses, the lot. You built that audience over years of making things for them, and it stays on their side of the door.

And on Patreon the list was never quite what it looks like anyway. Handing your email address to a creator is switched on by default, and a reader turns it off if they’d rather not. So the file isn’t a record of people choosing to hear from you. It’s a record of people who didn’t change a setting.

Can you point your own domain at it?

Check this one before you write anything. Substack will do it for fifty dollars, Ghost and Beehiiv include it at no extra cost, and a few smaller places still won’t do it at all. If yours won’t, you are building at their address whether you meant to or not.

What can still change under you

All of that assumes you’ll want to move one day.

Until 18 September 2023, you could read three paid articles a month on Medium without paying for them. Then you couldn’t. Medium deleted nothing that day. It changed one rule, and the change reached backwards. An article published in 2019, when any passing stranger could still read a few for free, was now shut to everyone outside the paywall.

Nobody asked the people who wrote those articles. There was nothing to appeal, either, because from where Medium sat nothing had gone wrong. A company changed its pricing. Companies do that. Every article was still online, still under its author’s name. All that changed was who was allowed to read it.

This is the part people don’t plan for. They plan for a platform shutting down, which is the loud version and honestly the easy one: you get a date, an email, a button to download your work, and a few weeks to be angry. What you actually need to be ready for is smaller and quieter. The rules change, the change reaches backwards, and the only real answer is to be able to leave.

What it doesn’t get you

Owning the address doesn’t make you self-sufficient, and I’d rather say so plainly than let you find out later. The site still has to sit on some company’s computer, and that company has rules about what it will keep there. I run one of those companies. Every host publishes a list of what it won’t carry. I have turned down three sites in three years: two for hate speech aimed at minorities, one for copyright infringement. I would make all three calls again tomorrow.

None of that was my personal taste. Magic Pages is registered in Austria, so Austrian law draws the line, and Austria draws it in places some countries don’t. Every host has a line like that, and in most cases it’s set by the country the company is registered in rather than by anything its owner believes.

So a domain doesn’t put you outside anybody’s rules. What it does is let you leave. It works in the other direction too: somebody I turn down keeps their name, finds a host that will take them, and the readers who already know where to find them still do. The name is yours, you can take it to a different company whenever you like, and nobody in that arrangement has a product decision to make about your archive. There is no version of it where somebody changes the terms of what you published in 2019.

Which is why the order matters more than the choice. Buy the name first, for the price of a couple of coffees a year, before you have written a word, and buy it at a registrar of your own rather than through the platform you are about to use.

Check how much of your work each platform hands back when you leave. Then pick whatever suits you.