Two businesses I know just lost their entire websites. Gone. Overnight. One day the sites were up, the next they were not, and there was nothing anyone could do to bring them back.
Both were on Squarespace. I am not writing this to dunk on a brand. The brand is not the problem. The setup is. Let me walk you through what actually happened, because it is the kind of thing nobody warns a business owner about until it is too late.
What happened
Two separate local businesses, two separate accounts. In both cases the website that customers Google before they ever pick up the phone simply stopped existing. Years of an online presence, wiped, with no warning that mattered and no version to fall back on.
When they went looking for help, they got the same answer both times. No backup. No rollback. No copy of the files anywhere. Start over from scratch.
Can't you just restore it? No.
This is the part that catches people. You assume a big platform keeps a copy of your site for you. That somewhere there is a save button you can hit and roll back a week. Most of the time there is not, at least not one you can reach.
On a drag-and-drop builder you are not handed the real files. You are handed a login to an editor that lives on their servers. When the account goes sideways, or the site gets removed, or something breaks on their end, you do not have the website sitting on your own machine to put back up. There is nothing in your hands to restore from.
So "just restore it" is not an option. There is nothing to restore from. That is the whole problem in one sentence.
Here is the real lesson: you were renting
When you pay a monthly fee to keep your site online, you do not own that site. You are renting it. The company holds everything. When it works, great. When it does not, you find out fast that you were never holding the keys.
I have written about the money side of this before, in why you shouldn't rent your website. That post does the math on what renting costs you over five years. This post is the part the math does not capture. The day it all disappears and you learn the hard way that none of it was ever yours.
Renting a website is not just more expensive over time. It means your business is built on ground you do not control. And ground you do not control can be pulled out from under you.
The one question to ask about your own site
Forget platforms and plans for a second. There is one question that tells you everything.
If your website vanished tomorrow, do you have the files?
If the answer is yes, you can be back up in an afternoon. If the answer is no, or "I think the company has them," you are renting, and you are exactly where those two businesses were the day before their sites went dark.
How I build so this can't happen
This is the whole reason I build the way I do. When I make a site, the actual files are yours. Real hand-coded HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that lives in more than one place. On your side, in a code repository, and on the host.
The site runs on Cloudflare, which is fast and free to host. But the important part is not the host. It is that the website itself is a set of files you own and can pick up and move anywhere, anytime, with no permission needed. If a host ever disappeared, the fix is a redeploy, not a funeral. There is always a copy.
That is not a premium feature. That is just what owning your website is supposed to mean.
The close
I am not posting this to sell anybody. I am posting it because I watched two good businesses get burned by something they did not know to ask about. Now you know to ask.
Answer the one question. If your site vanished tomorrow, do you have the files? If the answer is no, fix that before you need it, not after.