When you publish your site on Squarespace, you are not buying a website: you are leasing a plot inside a data centre operated by a US corporation, under US jurisdiction, on exit terms the company itself writes and can change. When you install WordPress on your own or a rented European server, you buy land with the deed in your name. The code is yours, the database is yours, and you can switch hosting providers in an afternoon without losing a single blog post. That difference — ownership versus perpetual lease — is the real democratic question behind any website-platform comparison, and almost no article frames it that way.
Why web hosting has a political jurisdiction, not just a technical one
A website is not just code: it is customer data, contact forms, purchase histories, email addresses, and often editorial content that some government somewhere might find inconvenient. Who can access that data, under what court order, and with what transparency toward the site owner depends entirely on the legal jurisdiction of the company hosting the service — not on where the server physically sits. The United States, scoring 7.85 on the EIU Democracy Index, is a flawed democracy with solid institutions, but it also has the 2018 CLOUD Act, which compels US tech companies to hand over data stored on their servers under a US court order, even when those servers are physically located in Europe.
This does not make Squarespace unsafe for the everyday needs of most small businesses. But it does mean that any data you upload to its platform is ultimately subject to a different legal framework than the one governing the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with less transparent avenues for government requests than exist within the European Union. For an online shop, a law firm, an NGO, or an independent media outlet, that difference stops being a technical footnote and becomes an editorial and risk decision.
Squarespace: excellent design, zero ownership
Squarespace Inc., headquartered in New York and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2021, offers one of the most visually polished website builders on the market: professional design templates, a no-code visual editor, included hosting, and automatic SSL certification. Plan pricing ranges from €16 to €65 per month depending on e-commerce functionality. For anyone prioritising speed and aesthetics above all else, it is an outstanding tool.
The problem shows up the moment you try to leave. Squarespace does not let you export the full site with its design: you can only export raw content (text, images, blog posts) in a format you must manually rebuild on any other platform. The design, templates and much of the configuration stay locked inside Squarespace's infrastructure. If the company raises prices, changes terms, or discontinues a feature you rely on, your only real leverage is resignation or rebuilding the entire site from scratch elsewhere.
Self-hosted WordPress: the option with a real owner
WordPress — the software, not WordPress.com — is an open-source project maintained by the WordPress Foundation and a global developer community, with no single company owning the product. When you install it on your own or a rented server, you control the code, the MySQL database, and every file on the site. You can export a full copy in minutes, move it to another hosting provider, and your site keeps working identically. That total portability is, in itself, a democratic value: no one can hold your digital business hostage by unilaterally changing the terms of a lease.
The democratic key with self-hosted WordPress lies in where you choose to host it. Providers such as Hetzner (Germany, EIU 8.80), Infomaniak (Switzerland, EIU 9.14) or OVHcloud (France, EIU 7.99) offer European servers under contracts governed entirely by GDPR, with no exposure to the US CLOUD Act, and with entry pricing from €4 to €12 per month for a medium-traffic site — noticeably cheaper than equivalent Squarespace plans, while also handing you full control over the software installed.
The other end of the spectrum: Wix and Israeli jurisdiction
Wix, the other major competitor in the no-code website-builder segment, is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, which scores 7.66 on the 2025 EIU index — a flawed democracy — but whose legal framework for national-security agency access to data is considerably less transparent toward the user than the European one. Like Squarespace, Wix is a closed system: design and configuration are not exportable to another platform, and the site owner depends entirely on whatever terms the company decides to apply. Functionally it is a solid product, but from a data-sovereignty standpoint it shares the same structural problem as Squarespace: zero control for whoever is paying the bill.
Comparison: control, portability and real cost
On ease of use, Squarespace wins clearly: no technical knowledge required, support is included, and security updates are handled by the company itself without user intervention. Self-hosted WordPress requires you to take responsibility for core, plugin and backup updates, or to pay someone who will — an added cost that has to be factored in when comparing both options honestly.
On portability, self-hosted WordPress wins without argument: you can migrate from Hetzner to Infomaniak, or from a server in Frankfurt to one in Zurich, in an afternoon, without losing design or functionality. On data jurisdiction, WordPress hosted with a European provider also wins: your data stays exclusively under GDPR and the courts of the country where the server resides, with no foreign law able to request backdoor access. Over a three-year total cost comparison, self-hosted WordPress on a European provider typically runs 30% to 50% cheaper than an equivalent Squarespace plan with e-commerce enabled.
2026 EU legislation applicable to web platforms and data hosting
The EU Data Act, being progressively applied since September 2025, requires cloud service providers to enable data portability between providers and to remove the technical and contractual barriers that make switching providers difficult — a direct legislative response to the vendor lock-in problem faced by users of closed platforms like Squarespace or Wix. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) add transparency obligations around content moderation and targeted advertising, applicable to any platform operating in the European market regardless of where it is headquartered.
The EU-US Data Privacy Framework, adopted in 2023 to govern transatlantic data transfers, remains the legal mechanism that allows companies like Squarespace to operate in Europe. But its two predecessors — Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield — were both struck down by the Court of Justice of the EU following legal challenges from privacy activist Max Schrems, and several European legal scholars consider the current framework could meet the same fate. Choosing European hosting governed exclusively by GDPR removes this legal uncertainty at the root, rather than relying on an international agreement that has already collapsed twice.
How Democratic Market evaluates web hosting services
For software-as-a-service products, Democratic Market applies a different methodology than for physical goods: we do not evaluate a country of assembly, but three independent legal variables. First, the country where the parent company holds its legal and fiscal headquarters, which determines what national legislation can compel it to hand over data. Second, the country or countries where the servers processing your data are physically located. Third, and most importantly, whether the service contract lets you export your data and configuration completely and frictionlessly to another provider at any time.
A service can have servers in a full democracy and still represent elevated risk if the parent company operates under legislation with broad extraterritorial data-request powers, as is the case with the US CLOUD Act. That is why Democratic Market does not recommend closed website-builder platforms regardless of where their data centres sit, and does recommend open-source software self-hosted with certified European providers, where all three legal variables align under the same democratic legal framework.
Practical buying guide: how to choose with a democratic criterion
First, if you have no technical background and prioritise convenience, weigh whether you can accept the cost of losing portability: Squarespace is a legitimate tool for a small, low-risk project, provided you understand your design investment stays locked inside its ecosystem. Second, if your project handles sensitive customer data, delicate editorial content, or you simply want real control over your digital presence, install WordPress with a European provider such as Hetzner, Infomaniak or OVHcloud: entry cost is similar or lower, and you gain full ownership of the code and the data.
Third, always require any provider — European or not — to confirm in writing the exact location of its data centres and the legislation under which the contract operates. Fourth, check before signing up whether the service lets you export a complete copy of your site in a standard, reusable format: if the answer is no, you are leasing, not buying. Fifth, if you are migrating from a closed platform to self-hosted WordPress, assisted migration tools and specialised agencies exist that handle the transfer without losing SEO rankings or historical content.
Performance, load speed and technical SEO
Squarespace handles image optimisation, the CDN and the SSL certificate internally, guaranteeing acceptable performance without any configuration on the user's part. That is a real advantage for anyone who does not want to deal with technical details. However, because it is a closed platform, the room for advanced optimisation — server-level cache control, choosing the exact geographic location of the CDN, fine-tuning Core Web Vitals — is limited compared with what a self-hosted WordPress with a specialised provider allows.
On your own European server, you can choose the exact data-centre region closest to your main audience — directly reducing latency — install a custom caching layer, and enable a European CDN such as Bunny CDN or OVHcloud's own, keeping the entire data-processing chain within European jurisdiction from end to end. For businesses that depend on organic search traffic, this fine-tuning capacity can translate into better Core Web Vitals scores and, as a result, better search rankings — a technical benefit that also reinforces the data-sovereignty argument.
Conclusion: choose ownership, not just design
Squarespace and Wix are technically competent products that solve the problem of building a good-looking website without programming knowledge. But under Democratic Market's criterion, neither offers what we consider the most important democratic variable for this type of product: real, verifiable, portable ownership of your data and your code at any time. Self-hosted WordPress with a European provider such as Hetzner, Infomaniak or OVHcloud achieves something no closed platform can match: your digital presence depends on a replaceable hosting contract you can switch in an afternoon, not on the shifting terms of a corporation that unilaterally decides what you get to take with you the day you decide to leave.
This article was originally published at Democratic Market. Read the full version with additional analysis on our site.
