Sounds like your problem is philosophical rather than technical.

Has this company been so accommodating that you cannot, in good conscience, quit doing business with them?

40 bucks-a-month is a lot to pay for hosting. But if you use acres of bandwidth (20+ gigs per month ?) and get fast servers and spot-on-the-job customer service that you use frequently, maybe you're getting a good deal. But I'm thinking not. I use o2g.net - fast, reliable, cheap (from $2.00/month); I haven't needed much support from them, so I don't know how responsive they are.

The 'very good' course you mention has seemingly trained you how to be dependent on your web host. Nobody uses a WYSIWYG editor supplied by their web host - not since the 70's.

Most webmasters use an ftp program like Filezilla or Fire FTP (a firefox add-on) so that a complete copy of your website resides on your home/office computer. That way, if anything goes hay-wire with your web host, you don't lose the entire site and have to start from scratch; and if you need to switch hosts you just upload the whole shebang with drag and a drop. A responsible hosting company would have told you of this - has yours ?

Actually, there are a few other steps, like changing the DNS servers for your domain name (easy) and perhaps uploading your mysql databases, if you use them. (you do have back-up copies of your databases, right ?)

As for the use of graphics you might read the TOS and see what rights you have to use them. Perhaps you can purchase equal or better; find public domain images; or create your own.

Hope some of this helps. If you shop around, then contact your current host and give them a chance to earn your business, that would be ethical, I believe. Just be sure you've backed-up all your files.

Maybe you should browse the forums of webproworld and see how other webmasters create and manage their sites.

btw . . . whats the url of the site in question ?