You could start your blog with someone like GoDaddy and move it to NameCheap with the import/export tools Wordpress has available.
I can even see from a quick search that proprietary solutions like SquareSpace will let you export a ZIP that you can then import into someone else like Wix.
- 50 websites: I just want to have my own website or blog
- 50 GB NVMe Storage: How many blog posts is this?
- 500 Concurrent Visitors: That doesn't sound like a lot, does it?
- Free SSL: What is that and why do I need that for my blog?
- Free CDN: What is that and why do I need that for my blog?
- DDos Protection: What is that and why do I need that for my blog?
Then after selecting plan and finding a domain, you have to give a ton of info and pay about $60 to get to the next steps. Which probably will be a world of pain again.
GoDaddy and other web hosts are the same. Their target public are developers and sys admins, not the general public. That's why the general public uses proprietary services for putting their creative content online. That's why the general public buys iPhones and doesn't care about how many gigabytes of RAM a phone has. That's why they buy new cars and don't know or care how many horses are under the hood.
On proprietary services like social media, you can start writing, posting and uploading at once, without setting up a dozen different services and routing, worrying about security and hacks, or having to pay out of pocket.
Things get even worse if said blogger or content creator would like to purchase groceries and decides to start charging for his/her work. Subscription / payment plugins are a nightmare on WordPress - and expensive to boot. Anybody who wants to keep his sanity will instead go for a proprietary solution.
Just like driving is for everybody and not only mechanics, the internet is for everybody and you shouldn't have to be a programmer or sys admin to be able to express yourself online. Just like you shouldn't have to know how to bore out a cylinder to be allowed on the highways.
You need to know how your car works, however, if you're 50 miles from the nearest garage.
If your livelihood and business depend entirely on a single social media site, that's a problem long term. I'm not talking about creators where their content is a side hustle; if your content creation is your full time income and you have a single point of failure, that should feel scary.
Reminds me of the stories of people that lose access to their Google account. They can't access any account they've created using that email, they had their passwords saved with it, and essentially couldn't function without access. For a more business focused angle, it's reminiscent of the Silicon Valley Bank failure. If you can't operate your business at all if one bank were to fail (or have an outage), that's kind of a problem.
Look at products like EasyWP on Namecheap.
https://www.namecheap.com/wordpress/
https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting
https://www.bluehost.com/wordpress
I think a lot of bloggers know that they want/need SSL, DDoS protection, and a CDN. I wouldn't confuse bloggers with the lowest common denominator general public.
Let's not put on our rose colored glasses and mistake the classic world wide web for something that didn't need a decent amount of knowledge to setup even in the plain HTML days.
A number of WYSIWYG blogging providers in that day (Xanga, LiveJournal) were not interoperable and basically shut down and erased your dat.
If you were using a website host like Geocities or something of that sort you needed to have some level of HTML coding knowledge or were using some very limited site builder tools.
And I would also say that the WYSIWYG blogging tools that are still out there are far more flexible than your typical closed wall social media platform. Services like Blogger and Medium have full export functionality as a part of their platforms.
For each blogger who knows what SSL, DDoS and CDN is, there are a hundred people who write their articles and publish them on Facebook to thousands of followers and millions of views. Or do they not count as bloggers?
If we look at the print world, the definition of an author is somebody who writes articles or books. He doesn't have to know how to operate any other machine than a typewriter. Whether he knows how to operate a printing mill has no importance when judging the quality of his penmanship. So why do hackers insist that people who are not Linux server admins do not count as real bloggers?
> And I would also say that the WYSIWYG blogging tools that are still out there are far more flexible than your typical closed wall social media platform. Services like Blogger and Medium have full export functionality as a part of their platforms.
Yes, they are excellent. And much better solutions for non-developers than self hosting WordPress.
And set up a mailing list! If you use Substack, buy a domain name. Otherwise you can use ConvertKit, Ghost, etc., and collect your reader's emails directly.