Hosting Switching Fees End in January 2027: What You Are Owed

On 12 January 2027, something changes in the contract between you and whoever hosts your website. From that date, a provider of a data processing service in the EU may not charge you a fee to move your data to a competitor. Not a reduced fee. No fee at all, including the charges some providers apply simply for transferring data out.

That is Article 29 of the EU Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854. Most business owners have never heard of it. It has been quietly applying since 12 September 2025, and the last piece of it lands in about four months.

I run operations for a hosting platform, so I read this regulation the way a provider reads it: as a list of things we now owe our customers. This article is written the other way round. What you are owed, when it starts, and how to tell whether your own hosting plan is actually covered, because a good number of them may not be.

What the Data Act is trying to fix

The problem the Commission set out to solve is vendor lock-in. Not the honest kind, where you stay because the service is good, but the engineered kind, where leaving is made expensive and slow enough that you give up and renew.

The European Commission describes the goal plainly: customers should be able to switch from one provider to another "quickly and smoothly, and without losing any data or the functionality of applications" ^[1]. The mechanism is a set of duties in Chapter VI of the regulation that apply to the provider whether or not your contract mentions them.

Three of those duties do most of the work.

Article 23 bars providers from putting obstacles in your way. The wording covers pre-commercial, commercial, technical, contractual and organisational obstacles that stop you terminating a contract, signing with someone else, or porting your data and digital assets out. That last category matters more than it sounds. A support process that only accepts export requests by post is an organisational obstacle.

Article 25 puts hard limits on the clock. Your notice period to start a switch cannot exceed two months. Once the process starts, the provider has a mandatory transitional period of 30 calendar days to get your data and assets across. Where that is genuinely not technically feasible, the period can be extended, but the extension has to be justified rather than assumed.

Article 29 deals with money, and it is the one with the date on it.

The switching timeline: what applies when

Date	What applies	What it means for you
From 12 September 2025	Chapter VI switching duties apply	Your provider already owes you a documented exit route
Until 12 January 2027	Reduced charges, capped at actual cost	A fee is allowed, but only cost recovery, not profit
From 12 January 2027	All switching and egress charges banned	Moving your data out costs you nothing

From 12 September 2025: the duties started

This is the part people miss. The switching obligations are not waiting for 2027. They have applied since September 2025, which means your provider should already be able to tell you, in writing, what you can export, in what format, and how long it takes. If you ask that question today and get vagueness back, that is useful information about the provider regardless of what the law says.

Until 12 January 2027: charges capped at cost

During the transition, providers may still impose what the regulation calls reduced switching charges. The cap is specific: they must not exceed the costs incurred by the provider that are directly linked to the switching process concerned. A provider can recover what the export genuinely costs them. They cannot price it as a deterrent.

In practice this is where most disputes over the next few months will sit, because "directly linked" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and nobody has litigated it yet.

From 12 January 2027: the charges go

After that date the charges are gone entirely. The Commission is explicit that this includes charges for data egress, meaning the per-gigabyte transit fees that have been standard practice in parts of the cloud market for years ^[1].

So what does that mean at street level? It means the price of leaving stops being a number your provider gets to choose. If you decide in February 2027 that your host is not serving you, the cost of that decision is your own time and whatever your new provider charges to take you on. Nothing else.

Does this actually cover your hosting plan?

This is the part a sales page would skip.

The regulation does not apply to "web hosting" as a category. It applies to a data processing service, which Article 2 defines as a digital service giving on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable, scalable and elastic computing resources, provisioned and released with minimal management effort ^[4]. That definition is built around cloud delivery models: infrastructure, platform and software as a service, along with storage and database services.

Read it again and notice what it demands. Scalable. Elastic. Minimal management effort. A cloud platform where you move a slider and get more capacity is obviously in. A traditional plan with a fixed allocation of disk and memory, where a human at the provider has to do something before your resources change, is a genuine grey zone. Analysis from firms advising cloud providers describes exactly this: services requiring highly individualised, labour-intensive setup sit outside the definition, on-premise and private deployments are excluded, and providers are having to assess service by service ^[5].

I am not going to tell you your plan is covered when I do not know that. Nobody honest can, yet.

What I will say is that the question is worth asking your provider directly, in writing, before January. If they say the Data Act does not apply to them, ask them to put the reason in the same email. A provider that has thought about it will have an answer. A provider that has not will tell you something vague about not being a cloud company, which is its own answer.

The limitation nobody mentions

Even where the regulation clearly applies, it does not make leaving free in the everyday sense of the word.

Article 29 kills the switching charge. It does not touch your standard service fees, and it does not cancel early termination penalties that were properly agreed in your contract. If you signed a three-year deal in 2026 and walk away in year one, the exit penalty in that contract is a separate matter from the switching charge, and it survives. Read your renewal terms with that distinction in mind, because the two get conflated constantly.

What this looks like when it goes wrong

Consider a typical case, and it is a common one. An audiology clinic in Donegal, one site with online booking on it, decides its host is too slow and asks to move. What comes back is a quote for a data export billed at an hourly rate, plus a lead time measured in weeks. Nothing about that is illegal today if the charge is genuine cost recovery. But while the quote sits in the inbox, the renewal date passes, the annual invoice is taken, and the clinic has now paid for another twelve months of a service it had already decided to leave.

That is the failure mode the two-month notice cap and the 30-day transitional period exist to close. The delay was never accidental. Delay is the product.

I have been on the wrong side of an export myself. Years ago I accepted a provider's export archive as proof that a migration would work, and we did not test-restore it until the cutover window was already open. Roughly half the media library was not in the archive. We rebuilt it overnight from a cached crawl. Nothing moves now until a restore has been verified on a staging environment first.

How Ireland will enforce it

An EU regulation applies directly, but somebody has to police it, and that part is still being built here.

ComReg is the expected authority for the switching rules. Its own page is careful about this, saying it "expects to be a competent authority under the Data Act" and that "the full scope of ComReg's powers as competent authority is not yet final", with Irish legislation confirming those powers expected during 2026 ^[2].

The shape is visible in the General Scheme of the Data Bill published by the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment. It assigns Articles 23 to 31, 34 and 35 to the Commission for Communications Regulation, which is precisely the switching and interoperability block. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission takes the data access articles and also acts as Data Coordinator. The General Scheme includes a head providing for complaints to ComReg, with the authority able to investigate, issue a notice of objections, or dismiss a complaint it considers frivolous or trivial ^[3].

For a business owner the practical upshot is short. Once the Bill commences, there is a named Irish regulator for "my host is making it hard to leave", and if you cannot work out which authority to write to, the General Scheme directs you to the Data Coordinator as the single point of contact. That is a meaningful change from the current position, where the only real remedy is to complain to the company that is charging you.

Do not act on this yet as though the machinery is live. The scheme is a draft, and until the Bill passes, the enforcement route is on paper rather than in operation. If a provider is charging you unreasonably today, your leverage is the contract and the regulation itself, not a complaint form that does not exist.

Before you give notice: a five-step check

1. Request the switching terms in writing. Ask your provider what you can export, in what format, how long it takes, and what it costs. The answer, or the absence of one, tells you most of what you need.
2. Verify what the export actually contains. A database dump is not a website. Confirm that media, themes, plugins and configuration are all in scope, not just the content tables.
3. Test-restore before you commit. Restore the export somewhere that is not your production environment and click through it. This is the step people skip and the step that costs them a weekend.
4. Compare the total, not the headline. A cheap monthly rate that comes with an exit charge, a renewal jump, and a support queue is not cheap. The hidden costs in low-priced hosting plans usually sit in the parts of the contract nobody reads at signup.
5. Keep the old service running until the new one is verified. Do not cancel on cutover day. Keep a rollback available until the new production environment has served real traffic.

Where the big platforms genuinely win

If you are running a genuinely elastic workload, multiple environments, autoscaling, infrastructure defined in code, then the large cloud platforms handle this materially better than any small managed host does. Their export tooling is mature, their documentation is thorough, and the Data Act's interoperability and functional equivalence duties were drafted with exactly that scale in mind. You will get more out of this regulation there than you will anywhere else.

That is not the situation most local firms are in. Most are running one WordPress site, a contact form, and a few hundred visitors a week, and their lock-in risk is not technical at all. It is a renewal price they did not expect and an export they were never offered.

What a provider that is not worried about this looks like

The regulation is only news if your provider was relying on the friction.

A platform that gives you full WordPress access from day one, with SFTP, a file manager and a database manager sitting in your own dashboard, has already handed you the export route. There is nothing to charge for, because you can take a copy whenever you like without asking permission. That is the standard worth holding any provider to, whether or not the definition in Article 2 ends up catching them: your data is reachable by you, in a normal format, today, without a support ticket.

That is how Web60 is built. Full WordPress, Irish infrastructure, and everything included for €60 a year with no per-feature charges, so there is no exit fee to abolish in the first place. If it helps, that is also why the hosting lock-in trap is worth understanding before you sign anything, not after.

Under the old norms, a request to leave started a negotiation. Where these rules apply, it starts a countdown instead.

Conclusion

Reviewing inbound migrations this month, the pattern that shows up again and again is not technical. People stay with providers they have already stopped trusting, because the cost and effort of leaving is unknown and unknowable, and unknown costs are the ones we avoid.

The Data Act attacks that specific problem. From 12 January 2027 the price of leaving becomes zero where the rules apply, the clock is capped at two months' notice and 30 days to complete, and Ireland will have a named regulator to hear it when a provider ignores both.

None of that helps if you find out in 2027. The useful move is the one available today: send your provider a short email asking what you can export, in what format, how long it takes, and what it costs. Whatever comes back, you will know more about your position than you did this morning.

Frequently Asked Questions

When exactly can my hosting provider no longer charge me to leave?

From 12 January 2027, providers of data processing services in the EU may not impose switching charges, including charges for data egress. Between now and then, a charge is still permitted but it must not exceed the costs the provider actually incurs that are directly linked to your switch. It cannot be priced as a deterrent.

Does the EU Data Act cover ordinary web hosting?

Not automatically. The regulation applies to a "data processing service", which is defined around scalable and elastic computing resources provisioned with minimal management effort. Cloud models such as infrastructure, platform and software as a service are clearly in scope. A traditional plan with fixed resources and manual provisioning sits in a genuine grey area, and providers are having to assess this service by service. Ask your provider directly and ask them to explain their reasoning in writing.

Can my provider still charge me an early termination penalty?

Yes. Article 29 removes switching charges, but it does not remove standard service fees or early termination penalties that were validly agreed in your contract. If you are inside a fixed term, the penalty for breaking that term is a separate question from the cost of moving your data, and it survives the January 2027 change.

How long can a provider take to hand over my data?

Article 25 sets a maximum notice period of two months to start the switching process, and a mandatory transitional period of 30 calendar days to complete it. That period can be extended where the switch is genuinely not technically feasible in the time, but the extension needs a justification rather than being the default.

Who do I complain to in Ireland if my host will not cooperate?

ComReg is expected to be the competent authority for the switching rules, and the General Scheme of the Data Bill assigns the relevant articles to it, with the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission acting as Data Coordinator and single point of contact. Note that ComReg says its powers are not yet final and the Irish legislation is still expected. Until the Bill commences, your practical leverage is your contract and the regulation itself.

What should I ask for before I switch hosting provider?

Ask four things in one email: what data and assets you can export, in what file formats, how long the process takes, and what it costs. Then test-restore the export somewhere that is not your live site before you cancel anything. An export you have not restored is an assumption, not a backup.

Sources