$180 per year? That seems excessive. My DigitalOcean ($6/m) box can handle 50,000 visitors every month without going over 15% CPU usage. It's running WordPress.org, using plenty of disk space, but is also managed entirely by me alone.
I run my blog on a $25 (not month, overall cost) Raspberry Pi 2[1]. I use Markdown. I (ab-)use S3 for image storage. I use 11ty[2].
It doesn't take a coder to know how to do this. And it doesn't take a lot of time, either. SSL certificates are free, thanks to Let's Encrypt, nginx is an "apt get" away. That's all it takes if you want to blog(!).
If you want e-Commerce or shill your newsletter or whatever else uses blogging backends like WordPress, then $177/year is a steal. If you just want to blog, the weekend with Eleventy and a free copy of Obsidian[3] are cheaper, less hassle, and you keep your data in a format that's not Wordpress' pseudo-XML abomination.
Sure, some can’t be bothered. Yes, some would rather pay a professional who often (notably, not always) would do a better job. True, some things you fully grasp only after years of experience. Still, it’s not that difficult. You don’t need to know how to write an OS or build an ICE from scratch to do an adequate job. People routinely learn to do quite complicated things out of passion and/or necessity even when it’s far disconnected from their primary profession; spend some time with the right sources of information and you’ll be alright.
Right, but you are comparing your setup and its costs to wordpress.com, which is not self-hosted and does not require that understanding.
If you're capable of buying a VPS you're capable of sticking a USB cable and an Ethernet cable into something.
With VPS, you typically must know how to SSH and be able to find your way around the system entirely without a GUI (which could be jarring at first). Personally, when starting out, I was always anxious about messing something up so that it makes the server impossible to boot remotely.
Pi, meanwhile, is just another computer you physically have and can do all the normal things you do with a computer you physically have with. It has some hardware peculiarities, but then it’s also simpler to set up than building your own desktop (which, by the way, is another thing non-engineers routinely do).
However, even after reading your comment, I am not convinced an average guy will understand any of those terms. I've seen this. I've seen many many people struggling to set up a blog. Heck, even I struggled about this back in the day.
I'm not some sysadmin guru either, and mostly just look up tutorials when trying to achieve some goal. E.g. Install better caching system, optimize for ram usage, etc.
But yes, I have been hosting my sites like this for over a decade so for me it feels like second nature. In saying that, I am sure there are other platforms that provide free blog hosting and can be used as alternatives. Sadly, it means you'll lose the WordPress.com subdomain, but also access to their network of bloggers.
I remember in 2012, I started a poetry blog on WordPress.com and in a few months I had 2,000 subscribers - all of whom found me through their discovery feature. It was quite nice.
I have no sysadmin/web experience, but do understand the terminal reasonably well enough from my old job as a SWE.
I currently manage a Wordpress installation on a ridiculously performant [1] $6/mo DigtalOcean droplet without issue.
For me, I struggled a bit with their default Wordpress plugin, but there's this fantastic (also free) droplet called Cyberpanel. It's basically an open-source alternative to CPanel, and offers a graphical frontend for lots of common tasks (domain management, auto-renewing SSL, PHP settings, deployment of WordPress and other sites).
Migrating from my old host was as easy as installing a plugin (All-in-One WP Migration, IIRC) on both the old server and the new DO droplet and then updating the domain records to point to DO.
All in all, maybe a couple of afternoons of screwing around, but absolutely a worthwhile (and economically valuable!) skill to have.
[1] I think I measured something like 1000 page loads per second (with WP Fastest Cache; crapped out at around 30 views/s without!) before CPU hit 100%. There are free stress test sites online that let you do this.
$6 deal is better when you work for free or can find someone to work on it for $9/month.
$15 per month premium includes:
* Premium Support
* Premium themes
* Sell products with WooCommerce
* Collect payments
* Automated website backups
I think setting these up will cost much more in self hosted version.
I'm fan of self hosting, but when I calculate it to my hourly salary then self hosting is very expensive.
> Earlier, there were five plans: free, personal, premium, business and e-commerce.... But at some point late last week, WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single ‘Pro’ plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB to 500 MB.
> Imagine looking for a good-quality surgical mask to wear in a park but finding out that the most reliable vendor in town has suddenly decided to sell only chemical safety masks.
Yes, it contains Premium support, premium themes, commerce, payment support and automatic backups, but how many of those features you'll actually utilize? Why would you want to purchase their automatic backups when you already have a system that backs things up better? Why should you pay for their commerce system when you already using a better third-party one?
It's not "But it's loaded with features" here, instead it's "Yes, it's loaded with features. But I (author) don't need most of it".
My electricity price increased 50%. I did not get any extra features.
>>For me the problems are the massive reduction in storage from 3GB to 0.5GM along with this new notion of maximum views, set quite low. I think those two combined will likely drive a lot of people away.
>> Me too I am only seeing my storage as 500mb and I have had a free site since 2013.
Those people are whining because they have used service for almost ten years and never paid a penny for it. People should understand that things are never free forever.
500MB is enough for free plan. If you use more then it is reasonable to get premium plan or host it somewhere else for cheaper.
Unless you now have the overhead of a massive VC-funded organization that needs to grow and hit the expected return multiples. People are “whining” because this is a 180° turn from Wordpress’ origins and their mission of “democratizing publishing”.
It is also a ton of money for anyone outside the US and EU - it’s one month’s rent in most of Brazil.
Giving away something for free, is something I will never do again.
Indian people were infamous sending their dick pics.
Storage gets cheaper per MB
They did have a price adjustment on storage, though… a 31% reduction for some use cases: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/s3-storage-class-price-...
Free users aren't generating revenue for them. In the past, it seemed like businesses had this idea that infinite free users would somehow lead to infinite revenue, but they seem to be moving away from this philosophy.
Storage has been getting cheaper every year. If a business is skimping on their free plan, it's not because of rising storage costs.
Also, what if I don't want many of those features? And I don't. This is why the previous plans, which were more graded, made sense. The annual billing option on the other hand caters to customers in need of all these features, who are also likely to be the sort of people who'd be willing to pay $180 at a go.
But I prefer hostgator. Maybe not as performant but it effectively serverless 0.1 tech that makes it easy to add sites and administer.
You can publish, have a legal claim on name and service and close to no smallprint. You can publish whatever is legal under local law and are responsible for it.
And: do not use any content management tools. They require a lot of attention over time. Write html. With any text editor.
Personally that’s way too little, and I’d absolutely go for a managed option