Digital Sovereignty: Why It Matters More Than You Think
Most professionals have built their entire online presence on infrastructure they don't own. Here's why that's a problem — and what to do about it.
Most people don’t think about their digital infrastructure until something breaks.
The email account gets flagged. The website goes down because the CMS subscription lapsed. The Instagram page with 8,000 followers gets disabled without warning or recourse. Years of content, contacts, and presence — gone, or at least hostage.
This isn’t a rare edge case. It’s the default outcome for anyone who has built their digital life on rented land.
What “renting” actually means
When I talk about renting your digital infrastructure, I mean any situation where:
- A company can delete your account and you have no meaningful recourse
- Your access to your own content depends on a subscription staying active
- The platform can change its terms, algorithm, or pricing and you absorb the impact
- You can’t easily export or migrate your data to another provider
By that definition, most professionals are renting almost everything. Gmail. Squarespace. LinkedIn. Medium. Notion. The list goes on.
I’m not saying these are bad products. They’re often excellent. But there’s a difference between using these tools and depending on them for things you can’t afford to lose.
The sovereignty stack
The good news: a surprisingly small number of changes dramatically reduces your exposure.
Domain name. Buy your own domain — ideally your name. Register it directly through a registrar like Cloudflare, Namecheap, or Porkbun. This is the foundation of everything else. $10–15 per year.
Email. Move your primary email to ProtonMail on your own domain. You keep the address forever regardless of what happens to any other platform. ProtonMail has end-to-end encryption by default and a business model that doesn’t depend on reading your mail.
Website. A static site deployed to GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages costs nothing to host and can’t be taken down by an algorithm. Your source files live on your computer and in your repository. No subscription required.
Password vault. Bitwarden is open-source, self-hostable if you want, and has been independently audited. It’s not going to sell to a private equity firm and change its pricing model the day you have 500 passwords stored. (Looking at you, LastPass.)
That’s it. Four things, mostly one-time setup costs. Nothing clever, nothing technical, nothing that requires ongoing maintenance if you set it up right.
The objection I always hear
“But I’ve been on Gmail for 15 years. Everything is there. It would take weeks to move.”
Yes. It probably would. And it will be harder next year than it is today, and harder the year after that.
The migration cost is real. But it’s finite — unlike the compounding risk of keeping everything on infrastructure you don’t control. Most people I work with say the migration itself took a weekend, and the peace of mind was immediate.
Who this matters most for
If you’re a founder, a freelancer, a consultant, or anyone whose professional identity depends on your ability to communicate and be found — the stakes are higher than you might realize.
Your email is your channel to clients. Your website is your permanent address. Losing either of those, even temporarily, has real costs. Getting them off platforms that can revoke your access at any time is cheap insurance.
And if you have children, or want to leave a documented record of your work and life for the people who come after you — a sovereign site that you own and control is the closest thing we have to a permanent presence.
Where to start
If you want to do this yourself, the order of operations is:
- Buy your domain
- Set up ProtonMail with your domain
- Build a simple static site and deploy it to GitHub Pages
- Migrate your passwords to Bitwarden
- Slowly redirect your accounts to your new email
If you want someone to do it for you — or at least set it all up properly and hand you the keys — that’s what I do. The Digital Legacy Vault package covers the website and digital CV. The Cyber Sovereignty Reboot covers the email, passwords, and privacy audit.
Either way, the point isn’t to opt out of the modern internet. It’s to stop being entirely at its mercy.
Drew Cleaver is a digital sovereignty consultant based remotely. He works with founders, professionals, and families who want to own their digital infrastructure.
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