57 ms·

What are you doing, WordPress.com?

468 points by LordAtlas 5y ago

vohu43 5y ago
That is why you should always try to host important stuff on your own. It always sucks to have dependencies of any kind. Virtual servers cost like a few bucks a month and you can easily set up a simple wordpress server in a few minutes.
- panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  Managing it after is I believe the bigger problem.
panicpanicpanic 5y ago
The author has published a new post: "Just more confusion" https://rootprivileges.net/2022/04/07/hi-wordpress-com-youve-complicated-it-further/ https://rootprivileges.net/2022/04/07/hi-wordpress-com-youve...
11235813213455 5y ago
I'm building my own e-commerce, based on a custom super simple headless-cms, using a super simple custom nodejs-express-react server (similar to next.js, but much more simple, no client-side rehydration, no need for client-side JS by default), emotion for styles, backblaze for files upload, render.com for hosting the server, mlab for the db, and I guess Stripe for billing. I hesitated to use WordPress for a few minutes...
- slim 5y ago
  fyi you are being upvoted because people are mistakingly interpreting your comment as sarcasm
  - 11235813213455 5y ago
    I don't see why, what's really wrong with what I said? It's about 15H of work to do it, worth it on many aspects
thrdbndndn 5y ago
Can't open. "Private Site This site is currently private. If you would like to request access, we'll send your username to the site owner for approval."
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  That's strange. I can read it fine in both normal and incognito windows. Try this instead? https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Frootprivileges.net%2F2022%2F04%2F03%2Fwhat-are-you-doing-wordpress-com%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Frootprivileges.net%2F2...
  - thrdbndndn 5y ago
    I can open it now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
Slightly off topic, but I think people are absolutely sleeping on gutenberg for wordpress. If you havent heard of it, its essentially reusable react components within the classic wordpress no code plugin ecosystem. Heavy development in this area could be the true no code solution.
- seanwilson 5y ago
  Could you elaborate? Other CMSs have nothing similar? My feeling is you can make an okay site with WordPress plugins only, but to make a great site you require custom code and should avoid most plugins to avoid bloat and security issues, and at that stage I'm not really sure how WordPress helps you in a way that's exceptional. The admin interface isn't particularly intuitive or modern, and has a lot of baggage, and the same could be said about the PHP API too.
- skilled 5y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong but Gutenberg has a long way to go to be considered half-respectable. I am more worried about the exodus it is going to cause once they do get it right. Website builder products and theme developers will wish they had a way to unionize once it happens because there is a lot of potential for the Automattic team to just take over that business themselves. And I wouldn't be surprised if it has come up in discussions, too.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    > And I wouldn't be surprised if it has come up in discussions, too. This is an oddly hostile take about one of the best corporate citizens the web has, IMO. There is an open question about what happens to the theme market generally once truly block-configurable themes exist (how many themes are necessary, really?) but pivoting that into some evil empire fantasy about Automattic -- a business that rescued Tumblr, that bought Simplenote to run it for free forever without ads simply because Matt Mullenweg depends on it -- seems a little odd.
    - skilled 5y ago
skilled 5y ago
$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.
- panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  I assume you must be technically qualified? I don't know a lick of VPS management. If something stopped working as expected, I wouldn't even know what went wrong – leave alone implementing a fix. WordPress.com until now – particularly in India – offered an excellent way out: affordable, reliable, good reputation, and feature-loaded. This plan change is inexplicable, especially also given what Mullenweg says in the interview.
  - skilled 5y ago
    I mean, DO does provide an out of the box WordPress installation. Just click "create droplet" and you have a WordPress site ready to go. You just need your own domain name (and even then, it is still cheaper than what WP.com is quoting). 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.
    - panicpanicpanic 5y ago
      It was, right? I hope anyone who's considering designing an alternative keeps this in mind. It was one of the best things about WordPress.com. This is also why I'm currently considering micro.blog.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
dawidloubser 5y ago
I guess this will push more and more bloggers to start looking at static site generators like Hugo ( https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ ) and either hosting themselves, or on one of the many "built in" cloud hosting providers that it supports.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago
  I doubt it will move significantly in that direction. Sure, some will look into that, but I suspect most people will just find an alternative, accept the lower quotas or stop blogging. I think a huge majority blogging on WordPress.com have no interest in learning the tech stack to run something like Hugo. The quick start for Hugo includes command line git, which will probably make 99% of bloggers stop reading. (n-gate.com seems to have died, but the prediction that WordPress.com bloggers would switch to static site generators and use git for version control would probably qualify as an example of the comical HN-bubble.)
- manuw 5y ago
  I like Hugo (or Jekyll) in combination with Netlify. I can just write something and push it to my GitHub repository. That's it.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    I have a site in Jekyll, but the tech stack is moving all the time and causes compilation errors. I’m not a Ruby dev, so I can’t compile my Jekyll site anymore, it was something along the lines of being programmed for Ruby 3.x while Ruby 4 is the default now, or something similar.
    - manuw 5y ago
      I switched to Hugo for this reason.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  They'll just used managed services from providers, publishing SaaS products that seem to be bundled with retail domain offerings, or something like Squarespace.
tbyehl 5y ago
One of the features WordPress.com doesn't offer on a free plan is a proper backup that can be restored to another WordPress instance. Posts/Pages/Comments and Media can be exported, separately, but for a proper backup you need to fork over $180. I have an old site on their $13/yr custom domain plan that I'm probably going to let die this year because I don't wish to keep paying for it and it's not worth that hassle to restore to its original state on my own server.
- jjnoakes 5y ago
  One time export and import is quite easy to do...
nixcraft 5y ago
If I were to build the nixCraft blog again today, I would avoid WordPress. It lost core value a long time ago. They are forcing unwanted features with block editor (gutenberg or whatever it is called) and whatnot. Take a look at Classic Widgets[1] and Classic Editor[2] plugins. Both are downloaded over million times just to restore old functionality. They no longer listen to the community. Not to mention it is the number # 1 target for hackers due to its massive popularity and vulnerabilities in WP codebase. We need to continuously apply updates to WP and its ecosystem. I will not dare put WP on the Internet without Cloudflare WAF WP ruleset or Nginx/Apache WAF[3]. It is madness out there. However, I am still thankful for the WP opensource edition. I learned all of my JS, CSS, HTML, and PHP skills as I have done everything myself since 2003. Just some random Sunday rant. [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ [2] https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-widgets/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-widgets/ [3] https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-waf/ https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-waf/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/waf/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/waf/
- kijin 5y ago
  The vast majority of known vulnerabilities are in the plugin ecosystem, not WordPress itself. The core codebase is remarkably well-maintained (of course, due to its massive popularity) considering its age and dedication to backward compatibility.
  - seanwilson 5y ago
    WordPress core is lacking a lot of features you'd expect for basic sites though (e.g. contact forms, caching, FAQ, SEO tags, social sharing) so anything but basic blogs require plugins or custom code. A big draw of WordPress is that non-developers can customise it with all the plugins that are available, so saying WordPress is secure as long as you avoid plugins nullifies this. It's terrifying that a contact form or caching plugin that you need to install because the functionality isn't built-in could result in a remote code execution exploit.
    - kijin 5y ago
systemvoltage 5y ago
It’s worth contemplating on Steve Job’s simplicity of marketing: Give consumers less choices. Cut down the number of SKUs and slim down the product line. Wordpress options at this point are just stressful. Do I really need to keep track of page views? It’s like the same absurdity when it comes to font licensing. Every time I want to buy a font, myfonts wants to inject a tracking script to track how many people visit the site. And then the same people complain there isn’t money in selling fonts. Simplify and give less stress to customers. Explain that in the marketing copy. For SaaS where the marginal cost is diddly squat, increase in sales will most likely offset whatever last penny you want to squeeze from customers. Marketing people just don’t get it. I’ve seen this happen in my own company, seen it first hand how it damages sales. Marketing that works with AWS doesn’t work with Wordpress. Totally different customer needs. Ghost blog guys do it better but it can still be simplified. Edit: I just checked https://wordpress.com/pricing/ https://wordpress.com/pricing/ – That looks very simple. Two choices, sorry for the rant, I was just going by the article.
- panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  I agree. Every time something like this happens, I just miss Posterous. I think they had it all right, including the simplicity. Then Twitter bought and shut them down. Edit: There's its avatar Posthaven but the Posthaven blog hasn't been updated since 2017.
- TobyTheDog123 5y ago
  That font example is ridiculous, but I don’t doubt it for a second. I see script injection as something similar to giving a spare set of keys out to your house. They want me to give them a spare set for the privilege of paying for the paint I used for the walls?
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Yes, you cannot purchase any webfont from MyFonts, regardless of the foundry, without this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40625980/how-does-myfonts-keep-track-of-page-views-for-their-webfonts https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40625980/how-does-myfont... License requires that you do not modify the font package they let you download which includes @import tracking.
gary_0 5y ago
My first thought is that stuff like this always leads to yet another "content churn" iteration, where even more user-authored stuff drops off the Internet, leaving behind an even more desolate wasteland of SEO spam and dead links. We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.
- TobyTheDog123 5y ago
  This is absolutely spot-on, and I think a lot of HN will agree with you here… …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry.
  - ngc248 5y ago
    Because web3 decentralization is not the solution. The web when it started out was pretty decentralized. Consolidation and centralization happened because of economies of scale and it was convenient for the users also as compared to self hosting. Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are already seeing this.
  - xenadu02 5y ago
    > …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry Because "web3" is a scam. Claiming to solve this problem is not the same thing as solving it or solving it well.
    - viksit 5y ago
      All solutions to problems generally start off as toys or proofs of concepts. and they improve over time. See: The Wright Brothers.
      - NicoJuicy 5y ago
taubek 5y ago
It seems that they didn't update all of their help pages. They still talk about old plans at https://wordpress.com/support/space-upgrade/ https://wordpress.com/support/space-upgrade/. I just checked my old, free account and it still says that I have 3GB space cap.
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  According to the forum, the space cap reduction only applies to new sites. https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/reason-behind-plan-upgrades/ https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/reason-behind-plan-upgrad...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cersa8 5y ago
I understand the frustration but as a business it makes a lot of sense to cut back on the plans and simplify things. It's happening all across the board and I myself have done so. Doubled the price, canceled the free plan and rolled out a single plan that covers everything. I was expecting push back and reduced customer signup but the opposite happened.
- fao_ 5y ago
  To be honest, I'm just baffled that this guy apparently saw "6 gigabytes of storage, free, forever" and his immediate reaction wasn't "Wow, that has to be a lot of data, I wonder how long they'll be offering this for" rather than "A cool deal! I can trust this to exist forever!". Free tiers do not make any money. So they have, what, 6 GiB of quota (however you want to imagine "quota" implemented) for thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, for 18 years. That adds up! It's getting more and more expensive to run datacenters (I can only assume they are using their own datacenters, and not renting space, as they've been live for about 18 years) via fuel costs, etc. This is the inevitable culmination of literally everyone in techbro culture telling non-techincally-minded people "If you would like a blog, you should use Wordpress. They have a high usage limit and are free". It turns out when everyone is using the free tier, the company has to tighten it's belt a bit? Who would have thought, under capitalism, that a company could lose money. Unimaginable. Woah.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    If you can't afford to run something forever, you probably shouldn't advertise it as free forever. That's misleading. I disagree with your assertion that people who were misled by this are at fault for being gullible.
    - fao_ 5y ago
      > If you can't afford to run something forever, you probably shouldn't advertise it as free forever. Sorry, what do you mean by "forever" in this instance? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? 200 years? 500 years? What if you start out being able to afford it but suddenly lose most of your funding overnight as result of bad press, and then have a court case on top of that? What if millions more people are using the internet and blogging than ever before? What if file sizes suddenly inflate to the point that what was tens of thousands of images, is now only a hundred images? The difference between 2002 and 2022, technology-wise, is extremely vast. 20 years is a very long time for a company providing a web service to have lasted. This really doesn't hold up on any level, the more questions you ask about the conditions of "forever", and the more you bring reality into the whole thing, huh.
Razengan 5y ago
viksit 5y ago
I’m surprised this hasn’t devolved into a web3 debate yet ;)
- Hjfrf 5y ago
  It's not a debate so much as occasional attempts at grifting that get shot down immediately.
Gravityloss 5y ago
Wordpress.com has provided great free service. It has been really easy to start a blog on that or other services. The editors etc have worked great, it's been easy to write text and insert images and mathematical formulas. Thank you for the service, it has brought humankind forward. Wordpress is of course under no obligation to archive old blogs, but it's been another very nice extra.
- deleted 5y ago
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kenneth 5y ago
Why do I have to scroll down not one, but two whole window heights below the fold to be able to see the opening line of the article. What does an irrelevant sunset have to Wordpress? I think the author could take a few design cues from Paul Graham's blog or from Craigslist. In fact, perhaps if he wasn't wasting his storage space with pretty but giant and irrelevant photos, the reduction in storage space wouldn't be as much of an issue.
- seszett 5y ago
  On the contrary, a picture of a sunset is actually very relevant to the article. It is the author's unwritten answer to the question they ask in the article title.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago
  I went to PaulGraham.com. There was a menu on the left so I clicked on some item and ended up on Amazon.com. I clicked back and the next thing I clicked took me to ycombinator.com. On my PC the menu is so small I can barely read the text, I think because he uses a gif as a menu combined with an image map. Wtf. On the main page there's some images without clear purpose and links with the titles "Taste", "Smart" and "Weird". No idea what that is about. I opened the site on my phone and it renders the page in the upper left corner and I have to zoom in to see what it shows. Is this the site which you think he should take design cues from? In my view the PaulGraham.com site is a complete train wreck.
- panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  I can't find any other media files on that site and the one in use weighs 900 kB. Doesn't seem like a big deal.
- r2222 5y ago
  Here’s a screenshot of paulgraham.com: https://ibb.co/zmmyZHH https://ibb.co/zmmyZHH This is legitimately the worst looking and confusing site I’ve seen in a while, and should be used as an example of how to not design a site :) Even the blog post themselves are pretty bad with left-aligned columns and the most low-contrast header (the “P A U L G R A H A M”) on the top. It looks like some sort of CSS mishap rather than something deliberately designed.
Derbasti 5y ago
Last year, I tried to migrate a personal picture blog away from WordPress.com. So I cancelled the subscription, and hit the delete-everything button. Which refuses to work. Because I still have a subscription, see, so why would I want to delete things? So I could just wait until the subscription period ran out, at which point the button would presumably work, but at that point all my password-protected posts and pictures would also lose their password-protection, becoming free for all the world to see. So, no thank you. I'm being cagey with details here, but it's just vacation pictures of my kids, nothing special. What to do instead? Click on each post, hit delete. Manually. No big deal, it's only a few dozen. But then, REPEAT THIS FOR EVERY PICTURE, because every picture has its own "post" in WordPress's database. Good thing I only uploaded TWO THOUSAND images. Seriously, clicking every single image manually was actually the fastest way to do it. Click all 2000 images (thank goodness there is that one view that at least allows multi-select), then click the delete button (and wait). This was painful. Had I known this beforehand, I would not have started a Wordpress.com blog. Also fun: at some point, WordPress.com had silently switched out all of my printable, high-resolution JPEGs for crappy, compressed WebPs. So I couldn't "just" import the Wordpress export into the next blog engine, I additionally had to finagle all of the pictures to point to the originals instead of the replacements. Of course this silent change had not in fact changed my storage quota. It still used three times the JPEGs' storage, which is why I wanted to migrate originally. Or that Wordpress.com uses a custom gallery that does not, in fact, export correctly, so I had to redo all the galleries when I imported the old posts in the new engine. Or that one time where they silently switched my theme, so all the galleries broke. And let's just not talk about the broken image upload if you're on anything but a rock-solid connection. (Hint: Gallery View, drag-and-drop, Edge, is the least unreliable process. The file picker, or directly inserting into posts, or Firefox or Chrome, just immediately quit as soon as the connection so much as drops a single packet). The blog is now generated by Publii, which is delightful, but a very different animal. TL;DR: Migrating away from Wordpress.com is even worse than using it.
- nomercy400 5y ago
  Repeating a somewhat lengthy action 2000 times is for me an excuse to look into automating this with something like selenium or autohotkey. Something that automates mouse 'clicks' on a browser. Measure how much time it would take to remove 5 images, multiply by 400. Can you automate it in less? Note that you might learn something new, and because it is a one-time script, it can be super hacky.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
> There hasn’t been any official announcement from WordPress.com either about what we’re seeing, whether these users’ experiences are the exceptions or the rules, or anything else. So WP .com changed a bunch of stuff and there was no warning? What world are we living in where that's wise? And acceptable? That said, if you don't use a domain you own and control then you're going to be a victim to nonsense like this. And while I understand everyone wants something for nothing, free is never free. If more people took the time to understand the hidden cost there would be less victim'ing.
- panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  Free is never free but why does free have to go from quite non-shitty to shitty overnight for no discernible reason? The point is here that "just here to blog" bloggers like me have been able to pay WP to have a custom domain, some storage, some SEO and some SM tools managed by WP – and nothing else. But now, to point a custom domain at my WP site, I need to cough up $180/yr. It's not just the free plan shrinking further, a fact you're commenting on, but that the sole alternative plan lies at the other extreme.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    Not to worry, I'm not defending Automattic. I do some WP dev. I see how things tilt. But. Again. This isn't the first time a free / low cost offering has changed.
bschwindHN 5y ago
Pointing people to one possible alternative if they just want to blog: use a static site generator. My company created a static site generator which pulls content from notion. You get the WYSIWYG editing of notion, with the speed and simplicity of a static site. You just have to find a place for static site hosting - github pages, firebase, netlify, etc. There are plenty out there. https://blog.tonari.no/blog-blog https://blog.tonari.no/blog-blog
- seanwilson 5y ago
  > My company created a static site generator which pulls content from notion. What triggers the site to be rebuilt and deployed? This works well with how pages are usually created and edited? How about being able to preview what the deploy will look like before publishing? I haven't used Notion much btw.
  - bschwindHN 5y ago
    We have a slack bot you can summon to deploy the site. We also have a QA version of the site to proofread articles and see how they look before publishing. The notion database has a "Published" checkbox on each blog row, which controls which posts make it into the production blog.
    - seanwilson 5y ago
      This works well for non-tech people? From a developer perspective, static websites are a dream, but accurate live previews and immediate/fast deploys on edits for site editors can be obstacles depending on your setup.
      - bschwindHN 5y ago
        I won't say it's perfect, but non-tech people can use it no problem. I suppose it's not technically a "What You See Is What You Get" because there is custom styling applied, but whatever content they put into notion is stylized the same as the rest of the blog so it stays consistent.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
I don't know if I should still be shocked at the lack of humility among geeks when criticising anything to do with wordpress (much less specfically wordpress.com, the most-used web hosting platform on earth). This thread is a nonsensical place to put criticisms of wordpress.org because I suspect rather less than about 0.001% of wordpress.com's customers are using that form of wordpress hosting (most customers do not have the right to upload their own code, or do any of the things that upset HNers). Finally, I imagine the point of simplifying their price plans is to move to in-app modular upgrades to allow people to grow as they want?
- deleted 5y ago
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m0llusk 5y ago
Everything about this screams "business opportunity". Not just providing alternative services, but helping with migrations also. People who have had their blog providers shift away from their needs are a whole new market segment that won't be going away any time soon.
hendersoon 5y ago
US$15/month in India is EXTREMELY expensive. The average monthly salary in the country is US$210, to give some perspective. Obviously there are many people particularly in urban areas who make far more, but that base price is sky-high.
p0d 5y ago
As a guy of 50 I observe we are at the end of a 20 year sales funnel squeeze for the big online providers of free. As the article points out when companies start to charge they may not be charging for what we want. For example, I've just migrated from Gsuite free as their squeeze wants me to pay for features I don't want. A lot of us have been spending a lot of time at the digital mall and may find ourselves back in our local, smaller shops. Maybe not a bad thing.
- deleted 5y ago
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netcan 5y ago
On one hand, prices change. Services change. When a sandwich shop stops carrying your favourite pickles... such is life. OTOH... I do feel this is problematic. Wordpress.com isn't FB/Twitter, but it is a meaningfully big part of social media... and therefore all media. A lot gets lost when the inevitable content loss happens. There are moral responsibilities and societal needs here that companies aren't going to assume. We should be accumulating an accessible and useful content commons. That's not compatible with commercial content hosting individual bloggers/users. I now think that the rights and wrongs of free speech in our era is much more complicated than I had previously thought. But whatever free speech ought to be, it cannot be both free and under the control of a few companies... even those at wordpress.com's scale. Can we really not just have a freedom (as in both freedom & $0) in the blogging space? Can't hosting be solved with an open protocol, or something like a wikipedia fondation? What we have now for social media really sucks. It sucks in terms of freedom. It sucks in terms of moderation. It sucks in terms of fake news, propaganda & such. It sucks in terms of power dynamics. The software/UI itself often sucks. Transparency sucks. Fairness sucks. It's not nice that content creators have to suck up to algorithm gods. The adware/spyware sucks. The fact that 2007's bogging golden age optimism resolves to this is terrible. Can it really be that the worldwideweb is possible, but blogging is only as resilient as your deal with a hosting company?
- deleted 5y ago
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wtmt 5y ago
I have a couple of blogs for social/community purposes on wordpress.com. They’re not really high traffic (hopefully not as much as 10,000 visits a month) and posts are probably less than a handful each month. There’s no way I’m paying the pricing indicated in this blog post. It is ridiculous for personal sites in India, and if wordpress.com forces existing blogs to move to a paid plan with severe restrictions, it will only lose more mindshare and market share in an environment where a lot of content is already being published in other walled gardens where the publishers don’t have to pay directly. I believe this pricing move by wordpress.com is not well thought out. If it comes to it, I’ll have to look for alternatives that are better and provide a GUI based editor. Subscription by email is something that visitors to the blogs seem to use. Transitioning that may be painful or impossible, but these aren’t sites that have a personal connection with the subscribers. A post about the move should suffice for those who are really interested in getting notified (as opposed to the majority who follow a blog in the hopes of their blog being followed in return).
- deleted 5y ago
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thematrixturtle 5y ago
Well, fuck. Any recommended alternatives? Self-hosting is a non-starter, I'm more than happy to pay someone else to keep PHP/MySQL etc patched, just not $180/year (!!!) worth.
- justusthane 5y ago
  Just grab any shared hosting for $5-10/mo (A Small Orange for example). They’ll keep PHP and MySQL updated for you, and many of them provide one click WP installs as well—and even if they don’t, WP is very easy to install, and it has a built-in one-click updater.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    Especially easy to install because often, for the bigger providers, there are provider specific instructions to install stuff. Sometimes even from the provider themselves.
- TimothyBJacobs 5y ago
  SpinupWP makes self-hosting WordPress sites really simple. Rarely do you ever need to actually make any changes to your server. You can just give it a Digital Ocean box to connect to, and it provides a UI to create sites and manage everything. https://spinupwp.com https://spinupwp.com
startlaunch 5y ago
Howdy. My name is Dave Martin. I'm the CEO of WordPress.com. VM (Sorry, I don't know your full name) thank you for sharing your concerns. Comments aren't open on your blog, so I'll weigh in with a few thoughts below. I'm happy to chat more about any of this in the comments below, or you can reach out to me directly via email dave.martin (at) automattic.com. You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me. Yes, as of this week we've gone from 5 plans down to just 2. That said, we're not done making changes. This was the first of a couple of phases of changes. Those 5 older plans that you mentioned were the culmination of like 10 years worth of plans and features sort of haphazardly being added to WordPress.com with no real strategy. With those older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another. Let me address a couple of the things you mentioned in your post: - No older sites/blogs have been affected by these new price changes. If your site is on an older plan, there should have been no changes to your billing. - As you pointed out, we have historically adjusted our subscription plan prices in a number of regional areas to ensure that WordPress.com stays affordable for folks in those areas. We will continue to do so. Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan. Thanks for calling this to our attention! We will get this updated ASAP. - Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying. - Our mission still remains to democratize publishing. We have no intention of ever removing older sites from WordPress.com. Even if you had a custom domain that expired, your site will always have a default WordPress.com sub-domain and your content isn't going anywhere. - The Pro plan you see now (at $15/mo) is essentially the the exact same plan as the old Business plan (which used to cost $25/mo). The only difference being the default storage that is available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo. - We will be announcing affordable add-ons for both the free plan and the Pro plan to extend both your traffic and your storage as needed. In fact, we plan to also add a handful of affordable add-ons to the free plan to make it easy for customers to pick and choose which additional functionality they want, without needing to upgrade to the Pro plan. Again, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry that I did a poor job of publicly sharing context around these changes, prior to making them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns.
bitwize 5y ago
At the end of the day, we must... mooooooooonetize our assets...
goatherders 5y ago
Things cost money. The fact that they didn't used to cost money is not sufficient inertia for them to not cost money in the future. I too maintained a free WordPress blog which, I suppose, will be impacted by this. But my nostalgia for keeping the musings of my 28 year old self alive and well SHOULD cost someone money...and that someone should be me.
- escapedmoose 5y ago
  I mostly agree, but it would have been a less painful move if existing blogs could have been grandfathered into the old plan.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
username223 5y ago
Cutting the free tier from 3 GB to 500 MB makes it useless for many people: that's 500 images at okay resolution, and lots of people like to put photos on their blogs. And 300 "visits" (page hits?) per day is almost as bad, as a runaway crawler or minor spike in interest can blow through that in no time. I moved away from WP.com when they started putting ads on the free tier. I thought their business model was upselling some people, so monetizing the free version felt scummy. The fact that they're crippling the free version now makes me even more glad I moved away.
- mobilene 5y ago
  You're going to pay for storage somehow, somewhere. For my photo-heavy WP.com blog (of 15 years!) I've always hosted my photos on Flickr. I pay the $50/year for Flickr Pro which gives me all the photo storage I could ever want. I agree with you about the ads on the free tier. Worse, the ads are extremely low quality. I complained about this (shaking my fist into the air, essentially) on my blog not long ago. https://blog.jimgrey.net/2022/02/08/why-i-still-recommend-wordpress-com-for-new-bloggers-but-am-not-as-bullish-on-it-as-i-used-to-be/ https://blog.jimgrey.net/2022/02/08/why-i-still-recommend-wo...
zenlf 5y ago
I remember back then when Vimeo started charging content creator somebody did a good analysis showing that they are basically charging what you would have to spend if you hosted the video yourself. Is this the case here for WordPress? Free resources are never free. I hope changes like this will pave the ways for the future of self hosting.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  We host all wp ourselves; it’s so simple these days. I have a script which just gets into ssh and runs docker compose and dumps all the passwords. Takes seconds and currently we host around 20 wps which makes the cost per wp 0.05$ per month. Sure it can go down but it never did and if it does, we’ll survive.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    > we host around 20 wps which makes the cost per wp 0.05$ per month Were are you getting servers for $1/mo?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mizzao 5y ago
Step one: run Substack's WordPress import. Step two: done. Looks like Substack is going to get a lot of new users...
kizer 5y ago
Makes me want to write a CMS/site builder. Node? Deno? Decisions decisions.
deleted 5y ago
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joeyzm 5y ago
Cached link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A0ZzHlu2-uYJ:https://rootprivileges.net/category/life-notes/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A0ZzHl...
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20220403111024/https://rootprivileges.net/2022/04/03/what-are-you-doing-wordpress-com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220403111024/https://rootprivil... https://archive.ph/orA2T https://archive.ph/orA2T
- alanh 5y ago
  (Context: The link appears to have disappeared, vanishing in a haze of unresolved DNS queries)
- panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing these links.
deleted 5y ago
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alanh 5y ago
Is the DNS for this link failing to resolve for anyone else?
- panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  Alternate access: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30899560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30899560
mrehler 5y ago
They haven't done the best job with rolling this out, but as someone who has had a Wordpress.com Personal blog (and dreamt of moving elsewhere now and again) this new plan is VERY tempting. The part of me that wants to tinker with my site as a non-developer? SFTP and Plugin access without the headaches that come from managing all my own installation. The next tier up on the older plans wasn't good enough for its money, but I wasn't going to pay $25/mo for a business site when I don't want to sell anything through my site.
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468 points by LordAtlas 5y ago

That is why you should always try to host important stuff on your own. It always sucks to have dependencies of any kind. Virtual servers cost like a few bucks a month and you can easily set up a simple wordpress server in a few minutes.

panicpanicpanic 5y ago
Managing it after is I believe the bigger problem.

panicpanicpanic 5y ago

The author has published a new post: "Just more confusion" https://rootprivileges.net/2022/04/07/hi-wordpress-com-youve-complicated-it-further/ https://rootprivileges.net/2022/04/07/hi-wordpress-com-youve...

11235813213455 5y ago

I'm building my own e-commerce, based on a custom super simple headless-cms, using a super simple custom nodejs-express-react server (similar to next.js, but much more simple, no client-side rehydration, no need for client-side JS by default), emotion for styles, backblaze for files upload, render.com for hosting the server, mlab for the db, and I guess Stripe for billing. I hesitated to use WordPress for a few minutes...

slim 5y ago
fyi you are being upvoted because people are mistakingly interpreting your comment as sarcasm
- 11235813213455 5y ago
  I don't see why, what's really wrong with what I said? It's about 15H of work to do it, worth it on many aspects

thrdbndndn 5y ago

Can't open. "Private Site This site is currently private. If you would like to request access, we'll send your username to the site owner for approval."

LordAtlas 5y ago
That's strange. I can read it fine in both normal and incognito windows. Try this instead? https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Frootprivileges.net%2F2022%2F04%2F03%2Fwhat-are-you-doing-wordpress-com%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Frootprivileges.net%2F2...
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  I can open it now.
deleted 5y ago
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ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago

Slightly off topic, but I think people are absolutely sleeping on gutenberg for wordpress. If you havent heard of it, its essentially reusable react components within the classic wordpress no code plugin ecosystem. Heavy development in this area could be the true no code solution.

seanwilson 5y ago
Could you elaborate? Other CMSs have nothing similar? My feeling is you can make an okay site with WordPress plugins only, but to make a great site you require custom code and should avoid most plugins to avoid bloat and security issues, and at that stage I'm not really sure how WordPress helps you in a way that's exceptional. The admin interface isn't particularly intuitive or modern, and has a lot of baggage, and the same could be said about the PHP API too.
skilled 5y ago
I mean, you're not wrong but Gutenberg has a long way to go to be considered half-respectable. I am more worried about the exodus it is going to cause once they do get it right. Website builder products and theme developers will wish they had a way to unionize once it happens because there is a lot of potential for the Automattic team to just take over that business themselves. And I wouldn't be surprised if it has come up in discussions, too.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > And I wouldn't be surprised if it has come up in discussions, too. This is an oddly hostile take about one of the best corporate citizens the web has, IMO. There is an open question about what happens to the theme market generally once truly block-configurable themes exist (how many themes are necessary, really?) but pivoting that into some evil empire fantasy about Automattic -- a business that rescued Tumblr, that bought Simplenote to run it for free forever without ads simply because Matt Mullenweg depends on it -- seems a little odd.
  - skilled 5y ago

skilled 5y ago

$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.

panicpanicpanic 5y ago
I assume you must be technically qualified? I don't know a lick of VPS management. If something stopped working as expected, I wouldn't even know what went wrong – leave alone implementing a fix. WordPress.com until now – particularly in India – offered an excellent way out: affordable, reliable, good reputation, and feature-loaded. This plan change is inexplicable, especially also given what Mullenweg says in the interview.
- skilled 5y ago
  I mean, DO does provide an out of the box WordPress installation. Just click "create droplet" and you have a WordPress site ready to go. You just need your own domain name (and even then, it is still cheaper than what WP.com is quoting). 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.
  - panicpanicpanic 5y ago
    It was, right? I hope anyone who's considering designing an alternative keeps this in mind. It was one of the best things about WordPress.com. This is also why I'm currently considering micro.blog.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago

dawidloubser 5y ago

I guess this will push more and more bloggers to start looking at static site generators like Hugo ( https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ ) and either hosting themselves, or on one of the many "built in" cloud hosting providers that it supports.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago
I doubt it will move significantly in that direction. Sure, some will look into that, but I suspect most people will just find an alternative, accept the lower quotas or stop blogging. I think a huge majority blogging on WordPress.com have no interest in learning the tech stack to run something like Hugo. The quick start for Hugo includes command line git, which will probably make 99% of bloggers stop reading. (n-gate.com seems to have died, but the prediction that WordPress.com bloggers would switch to static site generators and use git for version control would probably qualify as an example of the comical HN-bubble.)
manuw 5y ago
I like Hugo (or Jekyll) in combination with Netlify. I can just write something and push it to my GitHub repository. That's it.
- laurent92 5y ago
  I have a site in Jekyll, but the tech stack is moving all the time and causes compilation errors. I’m not a Ruby dev, so I can’t compile my Jekyll site anymore, it was something along the lines of being programmed for Ruby 3.x while Ruby 4 is the default now, or something similar.
  - manuw 5y ago
    I switched to Hugo for this reason.
heavyset_go 5y ago
They'll just used managed services from providers, publishing SaaS products that seem to be bundled with retail domain offerings, or something like Squarespace.

tbyehl 5y ago

One of the features WordPress.com doesn't offer on a free plan is a proper backup that can be restored to another WordPress instance. Posts/Pages/Comments and Media can be exported, separately, but for a proper backup you need to fork over $180. I have an old site on their $13/yr custom domain plan that I'm probably going to let die this year because I don't wish to keep paying for it and it's not worth that hassle to restore to its original state on my own server.

jjnoakes 5y ago
One time export and import is quite easy to do...

nixcraft 5y ago

If I were to build the nixCraft blog again today, I would avoid WordPress. It lost core value a long time ago. They are forcing unwanted features with block editor (gutenberg or whatever it is called) and whatnot. Take a look at Classic Widgets[1] and Classic Editor[2] plugins. Both are downloaded over million times just to restore old functionality. They no longer listen to the community. Not to mention it is the number # 1 target for hackers due to its massive popularity and vulnerabilities in WP codebase. We need to continuously apply updates to WP and its ecosystem. I will not dare put WP on the Internet without Cloudflare WAF WP ruleset or Nginx/Apache WAF[3]. It is madness out there. However, I am still thankful for the WP opensource edition. I learned all of my JS, CSS, HTML, and PHP skills as I have done everything myself since 2003. Just some random Sunday rant. [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ [2] https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-widgets/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-widgets/ [3] https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-waf/ https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-waf/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/waf/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/waf/

kijin 5y ago
The vast majority of known vulnerabilities are in the plugin ecosystem, not WordPress itself. The core codebase is remarkably well-maintained (of course, due to its massive popularity) considering its age and dedication to backward compatibility.
- seanwilson 5y ago
  WordPress core is lacking a lot of features you'd expect for basic sites though (e.g. contact forms, caching, FAQ, SEO tags, social sharing) so anything but basic blogs require plugins or custom code. A big draw of WordPress is that non-developers can customise it with all the plugins that are available, so saying WordPress is secure as long as you avoid plugins nullifies this. It's terrifying that a contact form or caching plugin that you need to install because the functionality isn't built-in could result in a remote code execution exploit.
  - kijin 5y ago

systemvoltage 5y ago

It’s worth contemplating on Steve Job’s simplicity of marketing: Give consumers less choices. Cut down the number of SKUs and slim down the product line. Wordpress options at this point are just stressful. Do I really need to keep track of page views? It’s like the same absurdity when it comes to font licensing. Every time I want to buy a font, myfonts wants to inject a tracking script to track how many people visit the site. And then the same people complain there isn’t money in selling fonts. Simplify and give less stress to customers. Explain that in the marketing copy. For SaaS where the marginal cost is diddly squat, increase in sales will most likely offset whatever last penny you want to squeeze from customers. Marketing people just don’t get it. I’ve seen this happen in my own company, seen it first hand how it damages sales. Marketing that works with AWS doesn’t work with Wordpress. Totally different customer needs. Ghost blog guys do it better but it can still be simplified. Edit: I just checked https://wordpress.com/pricing/ https://wordpress.com/pricing/ – That looks very simple. Two choices, sorry for the rant, I was just going by the article.

panicpanicpanic 5y ago
I agree. Every time something like this happens, I just miss Posterous. I think they had it all right, including the simplicity. Then Twitter bought and shut them down. Edit: There's its avatar Posthaven but the Posthaven blog hasn't been updated since 2017.
TobyTheDog123 5y ago
That font example is ridiculous, but I don’t doubt it for a second. I see script injection as something similar to giving a spare set of keys out to your house. They want me to give them a spare set for the privilege of paying for the paint I used for the walls?
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Yes, you cannot purchase any webfont from MyFonts, regardless of the foundry, without this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40625980/how-does-myfonts-keep-track-of-page-views-for-their-webfonts https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40625980/how-does-myfont... License requires that you do not modify the font package they let you download which includes @import tracking.

gary_0 5y ago

My first thought is that stuff like this always leads to yet another "content churn" iteration, where even more user-authored stuff drops off the Internet, leaving behind an even more desolate wasteland of SEO spam and dead links. We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.

TobyTheDog123 5y ago
This is absolutely spot-on, and I think a lot of HN will agree with you here… …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry.
- ngc248 5y ago
  Because web3 decentralization is not the solution. The web when it started out was pretty decentralized. Consolidation and centralization happened because of economies of scale and it was convenient for the users also as compared to self hosting. Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are already seeing this.
- xenadu02 5y ago
  > …which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry Because "web3" is a scam. Claiming to solve this problem is not the same thing as solving it or solving it well.
  - viksit 5y ago
    All solutions to problems generally start off as toys or proofs of concepts. and they improve over time. See: The Wright Brothers.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago

taubek 5y ago

It seems that they didn't update all of their help pages. They still talk about old plans at https://wordpress.com/support/space-upgrade/ https://wordpress.com/support/space-upgrade/. I just checked my old, free account and it still says that I have 3GB space cap.

joshuaissac 5y ago
According to the forum, the space cap reduction only applies to new sites. https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/reason-behind-plan-upgrades/ https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/reason-behind-plan-upgrad...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cersa8 5y ago

I understand the frustration but as a business it makes a lot of sense to cut back on the plans and simplify things. It's happening all across the board and I myself have done so. Doubled the price, canceled the free plan and rolled out a single plan that covers everything. I was expecting push back and reduced customer signup but the opposite happened.

fao_ 5y ago
To be honest, I'm just baffled that this guy apparently saw "6 gigabytes of storage, free, forever" and his immediate reaction wasn't "Wow, that has to be a lot of data, I wonder how long they'll be offering this for" rather than "A cool deal! I can trust this to exist forever!". Free tiers do not make any money. So they have, what, 6 GiB of quota (however you want to imagine "quota" implemented) for thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, for 18 years. That adds up! It's getting more and more expensive to run datacenters (I can only assume they are using their own datacenters, and not renting space, as they've been live for about 18 years) via fuel costs, etc. This is the inevitable culmination of literally everyone in techbro culture telling non-techincally-minded people "If you would like a blog, you should use Wordpress. They have a high usage limit and are free". It turns out when everyone is using the free tier, the company has to tighten it's belt a bit? Who would have thought, under capitalism, that a company could lose money. Unimaginable. Woah.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  If you can't afford to run something forever, you probably shouldn't advertise it as free forever. That's misleading. I disagree with your assertion that people who were misled by this are at fault for being gullible.
  - fao_ 5y ago
    > If you can't afford to run something forever, you probably shouldn't advertise it as free forever. Sorry, what do you mean by "forever" in this instance? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? 200 years? 500 years? What if you start out being able to afford it but suddenly lose most of your funding overnight as result of bad press, and then have a court case on top of that? What if millions more people are using the internet and blogging than ever before? What if file sizes suddenly inflate to the point that what was tens of thousands of images, is now only a hundred images? The difference between 2002 and 2022, technology-wise, is extremely vast. 20 years is a very long time for a company providing a web service to have lasted. This really doesn't hold up on any level, the more questions you ask about the conditions of "forever", and the more you bring reality into the whole thing, huh.

Razengan 5y ago

viksit 5y ago

I’m surprised this hasn’t devolved into a web3 debate yet ;)

Hjfrf 5y ago
It's not a debate so much as occasional attempts at grifting that get shot down immediately.

Gravityloss 5y ago

Wordpress.com has provided great free service. It has been really easy to start a blog on that or other services. The editors etc have worked great, it's been easy to write text and insert images and mathematical formulas. Thank you for the service, it has brought humankind forward. Wordpress is of course under no obligation to archive old blogs, but it's been another very nice extra.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kenneth 5y ago

Why do I have to scroll down not one, but two whole window heights below the fold to be able to see the opening line of the article. What does an irrelevant sunset have to Wordpress? I think the author could take a few design cues from Paul Graham's blog or from Craigslist. In fact, perhaps if he wasn't wasting his storage space with pretty but giant and irrelevant photos, the reduction in storage space wouldn't be as much of an issue.

seszett 5y ago
On the contrary, a picture of a sunset is actually very relevant to the article. It is the author's unwritten answer to the question they ask in the article title.
tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y ago
I went to PaulGraham.com. There was a menu on the left so I clicked on some item and ended up on Amazon.com. I clicked back and the next thing I clicked took me to ycombinator.com. On my PC the menu is so small I can barely read the text, I think because he uses a gif as a menu combined with an image map. Wtf. On the main page there's some images without clear purpose and links with the titles "Taste", "Smart" and "Weird". No idea what that is about. I opened the site on my phone and it renders the page in the upper left corner and I have to zoom in to see what it shows. Is this the site which you think he should take design cues from? In my view the PaulGraham.com site is a complete train wreck.
panicpanicpanic 5y ago
I can't find any other media files on that site and the one in use weighs 900 kB. Doesn't seem like a big deal.
r2222 5y ago
Here’s a screenshot of paulgraham.com: https://ibb.co/zmmyZHH https://ibb.co/zmmyZHH This is legitimately the worst looking and confusing site I’ve seen in a while, and should be used as an example of how to not design a site :) Even the blog post themselves are pretty bad with left-aligned columns and the most low-contrast header (the “P A U L G R A H A M”) on the top. It looks like some sort of CSS mishap rather than something deliberately designed.

Derbasti 5y ago

Last year, I tried to migrate a personal picture blog away from WordPress.com. So I cancelled the subscription, and hit the delete-everything button. Which refuses to work. Because I still have a subscription, see, so why would I want to delete things? So I could just wait until the subscription period ran out, at which point the button would presumably work, but at that point all my password-protected posts and pictures would also lose their password-protection, becoming free for all the world to see. So, no thank you. I'm being cagey with details here, but it's just vacation pictures of my kids, nothing special. What to do instead? Click on each post, hit delete. Manually. No big deal, it's only a few dozen. But then, REPEAT THIS FOR EVERY PICTURE, because every picture has its own "post" in WordPress's database. Good thing I only uploaded TWO THOUSAND images. Seriously, clicking every single image manually was actually the fastest way to do it. Click all 2000 images (thank goodness there is that one view that at least allows multi-select), then click the delete button (and wait). This was painful. Had I known this beforehand, I would not have started a Wordpress.com blog. Also fun: at some point, WordPress.com had silently switched out all of my printable, high-resolution JPEGs for crappy, compressed WebPs. So I couldn't "just" import the Wordpress export into the next blog engine, I additionally had to finagle all of the pictures to point to the originals instead of the replacements. Of course this silent change had not in fact changed my storage quota. It still used three times the JPEGs' storage, which is why I wanted to migrate originally. Or that Wordpress.com uses a custom gallery that does not, in fact, export correctly, so I had to redo all the galleries when I imported the old posts in the new engine. Or that one time where they silently switched my theme, so all the galleries broke. And let's just not talk about the broken image upload if you're on anything but a rock-solid connection. (Hint: Gallery View, drag-and-drop, Edge, is the least unreliable process. The file picker, or directly inserting into posts, or Firefox or Chrome, just immediately quit as soon as the connection so much as drops a single packet). The blog is now generated by Publii, which is delightful, but a very different animal. TL;DR: Migrating away from Wordpress.com is even worse than using it.

nomercy400 5y ago
Repeating a somewhat lengthy action 2000 times is for me an excuse to look into automating this with something like selenium or autohotkey. Something that automates mouse 'clicks' on a browser. Measure how much time it would take to remove 5 images, multiply by 400. Can you automate it in less? Note that you might learn something new, and because it is a one-time script, it can be super hacky.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

> There hasn’t been any official announcement from WordPress.com either about what we’re seeing, whether these users’ experiences are the exceptions or the rules, or anything else. So WP .com changed a bunch of stuff and there was no warning? What world are we living in where that's wise? And acceptable? That said, if you don't use a domain you own and control then you're going to be a victim to nonsense like this. And while I understand everyone wants something for nothing, free is never free. If more people took the time to understand the hidden cost there would be less victim'ing.

panicpanicpanic 5y ago
Free is never free but why does free have to go from quite non-shitty to shitty overnight for no discernible reason? The point is here that "just here to blog" bloggers like me have been able to pay WP to have a custom domain, some storage, some SEO and some SM tools managed by WP – and nothing else. But now, to point a custom domain at my WP site, I need to cough up $180/yr. It's not just the free plan shrinking further, a fact you're commenting on, but that the sole alternative plan lies at the other extreme.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Not to worry, I'm not defending Automattic. I do some WP dev. I see how things tilt. But. Again. This isn't the first time a free / low cost offering has changed.

bschwindHN 5y ago

Pointing people to one possible alternative if they just want to blog: use a static site generator. My company created a static site generator which pulls content from notion. You get the WYSIWYG editing of notion, with the speed and simplicity of a static site. You just have to find a place for static site hosting - github pages, firebase, netlify, etc. There are plenty out there. https://blog.tonari.no/blog-blog https://blog.tonari.no/blog-blog

seanwilson 5y ago
> My company created a static site generator which pulls content from notion. What triggers the site to be rebuilt and deployed? This works well with how pages are usually created and edited? How about being able to preview what the deploy will look like before publishing? I haven't used Notion much btw.
- bschwindHN 5y ago
  We have a slack bot you can summon to deploy the site. We also have a QA version of the site to proofread articles and see how they look before publishing. The notion database has a "Published" checkbox on each blog row, which controls which posts make it into the production blog.
  - seanwilson 5y ago
    This works well for non-tech people? From a developer perspective, static websites are a dream, but accurate live previews and immediate/fast deploys on edits for site editors can be obstacles depending on your setup.
    - bschwindHN 5y ago
      I won't say it's perfect, but non-tech people can use it no problem. I suppose it's not technically a "What You See Is What You Get" because there is custom styling applied, but whatever content they put into notion is stylized the same as the rest of the blog so it stays consistent.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

I don't know if I should still be shocked at the lack of humility among geeks when criticising anything to do with wordpress (much less specfically wordpress.com, the most-used web hosting platform on earth). This thread is a nonsensical place to put criticisms of wordpress.org because I suspect rather less than about 0.001% of wordpress.com's customers are using that form of wordpress hosting (most customers do not have the right to upload their own code, or do any of the things that upset HNers). Finally, I imagine the point of simplifying their price plans is to move to in-app modular upgrades to allow people to grow as they want?

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m0llusk 5y ago

Everything about this screams "business opportunity". Not just providing alternative services, but helping with migrations also. People who have had their blog providers shift away from their needs are a whole new market segment that won't be going away any time soon.

hendersoon 5y ago

US$15/month in India is EXTREMELY expensive. The average monthly salary in the country is US$210, to give some perspective. Obviously there are many people particularly in urban areas who make far more, but that base price is sky-high.

p0d 5y ago

As a guy of 50 I observe we are at the end of a 20 year sales funnel squeeze for the big online providers of free. As the article points out when companies start to charge they may not be charging for what we want. For example, I've just migrated from Gsuite free as their squeeze wants me to pay for features I don't want. A lot of us have been spending a lot of time at the digital mall and may find ourselves back in our local, smaller shops. Maybe not a bad thing.

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netcan 5y ago

On one hand, prices change. Services change. When a sandwich shop stops carrying your favourite pickles... such is life. OTOH... I do feel this is problematic. Wordpress.com isn't FB/Twitter, but it is a meaningfully big part of social media... and therefore all media. A lot gets lost when the inevitable content loss happens. There are moral responsibilities and societal needs here that companies aren't going to assume. We should be accumulating an accessible and useful content commons. That's not compatible with commercial content hosting individual bloggers/users. I now think that the rights and wrongs of free speech in our era is much more complicated than I had previously thought. But whatever free speech ought to be, it cannot be both free and under the control of a few companies... even those at wordpress.com's scale. Can we really not just have a freedom (as in both freedom & $0) in the blogging space? Can't hosting be solved with an open protocol, or something like a wikipedia fondation? What we have now for social media really sucks. It sucks in terms of freedom. It sucks in terms of moderation. It sucks in terms of fake news, propaganda & such. It sucks in terms of power dynamics. The software/UI itself often sucks. Transparency sucks. Fairness sucks. It's not nice that content creators have to suck up to algorithm gods. The adware/spyware sucks. The fact that 2007's bogging golden age optimism resolves to this is terrible. Can it really be that the worldwideweb is possible, but blogging is only as resilient as your deal with a hosting company?

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wtmt 5y ago

I have a couple of blogs for social/community purposes on wordpress.com. They’re not really high traffic (hopefully not as much as 10,000 visits a month) and posts are probably less than a handful each month. There’s no way I’m paying the pricing indicated in this blog post. It is ridiculous for personal sites in India, and if wordpress.com forces existing blogs to move to a paid plan with severe restrictions, it will only lose more mindshare and market share in an environment where a lot of content is already being published in other walled gardens where the publishers don’t have to pay directly. I believe this pricing move by wordpress.com is not well thought out. If it comes to it, I’ll have to look for alternatives that are better and provide a GUI based editor. Subscription by email is something that visitors to the blogs seem to use. Transitioning that may be painful or impossible, but these aren’t sites that have a personal connection with the subscribers. A post about the move should suffice for those who are really interested in getting notified (as opposed to the majority who follow a blog in the hopes of their blog being followed in return).

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thematrixturtle 5y ago

Well, fuck. Any recommended alternatives? Self-hosting is a non-starter, I'm more than happy to pay someone else to keep PHP/MySQL etc patched, just not $180/year (!!!) worth.

justusthane 5y ago
Just grab any shared hosting for $5-10/mo (A Small Orange for example). They’ll keep PHP and MySQL updated for you, and many of them provide one click WP installs as well—and even if they don’t, WP is very easy to install, and it has a built-in one-click updater.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Especially easy to install because often, for the bigger providers, there are provider specific instructions to install stuff. Sometimes even from the provider themselves.
TimothyBJacobs 5y ago
SpinupWP makes self-hosting WordPress sites really simple. Rarely do you ever need to actually make any changes to your server. You can just give it a Digital Ocean box to connect to, and it provides a UI to create sites and manage everything. https://spinupwp.com https://spinupwp.com

startlaunch 5y ago

Howdy. My name is Dave Martin. I'm the CEO of WordPress.com. VM (Sorry, I don't know your full name) thank you for sharing your concerns. Comments aren't open on your blog, so I'll weigh in with a few thoughts below. I'm happy to chat more about any of this in the comments below, or you can reach out to me directly via email dave.martin (at) automattic.com. You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me. Yes, as of this week we've gone from 5 plans down to just 2. That said, we're not done making changes. This was the first of a couple of phases of changes. Those 5 older plans that you mentioned were the culmination of like 10 years worth of plans and features sort of haphazardly being added to WordPress.com with no real strategy. With those older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another. Let me address a couple of the things you mentioned in your post: - No older sites/blogs have been affected by these new price changes. If your site is on an older plan, there should have been no changes to your billing. - As you pointed out, we have historically adjusted our subscription plan prices in a number of regional areas to ensure that WordPress.com stays affordable for folks in those areas. We will continue to do so. Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan. Thanks for calling this to our attention! We will get this updated ASAP. - Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying. - Our mission still remains to democratize publishing. We have no intention of ever removing older sites from WordPress.com. Even if you had a custom domain that expired, your site will always have a default WordPress.com sub-domain and your content isn't going anywhere. - The Pro plan you see now (at $15/mo) is essentially the the exact same plan as the old Business plan (which used to cost $25/mo). The only difference being the default storage that is available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo. - We will be announcing affordable add-ons for both the free plan and the Pro plan to extend both your traffic and your storage as needed. In fact, we plan to also add a handful of affordable add-ons to the free plan to make it easy for customers to pick and choose which additional functionality they want, without needing to upgrade to the Pro plan. Again, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry that I did a poor job of publicly sharing context around these changes, prior to making them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns.

bitwize 5y ago

At the end of the day, we must... mooooooooonetize our assets...

goatherders 5y ago

Things cost money. The fact that they didn't used to cost money is not sufficient inertia for them to not cost money in the future. I too maintained a free WordPress blog which, I suppose, will be impacted by this. But my nostalgia for keeping the musings of my 28 year old self alive and well SHOULD cost someone money...and that someone should be me.

escapedmoose 5y ago
I mostly agree, but it would have been a less painful move if existing blogs could have been grandfathered into the old plan.
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username223 5y ago

Cutting the free tier from 3 GB to 500 MB makes it useless for many people: that's 500 images at okay resolution, and lots of people like to put photos on their blogs. And 300 "visits" (page hits?) per day is almost as bad, as a runaway crawler or minor spike in interest can blow through that in no time. I moved away from WP.com when they started putting ads on the free tier. I thought their business model was upselling some people, so monetizing the free version felt scummy. The fact that they're crippling the free version now makes me even more glad I moved away.

mobilene 5y ago
You're going to pay for storage somehow, somewhere. For my photo-heavy WP.com blog (of 15 years!) I've always hosted my photos on Flickr. I pay the $50/year for Flickr Pro which gives me all the photo storage I could ever want. I agree with you about the ads on the free tier. Worse, the ads are extremely low quality. I complained about this (shaking my fist into the air, essentially) on my blog not long ago. https://blog.jimgrey.net/2022/02/08/why-i-still-recommend-wordpress-com-for-new-bloggers-but-am-not-as-bullish-on-it-as-i-used-to-be/ https://blog.jimgrey.net/2022/02/08/why-i-still-recommend-wo...

zenlf 5y ago

I remember back then when Vimeo started charging content creator somebody did a good analysis showing that they are basically charging what you would have to spend if you hosted the video yourself. Is this the case here for WordPress? Free resources are never free. I hope changes like this will pave the ways for the future of self hosting.

tluyben2 5y ago
We host all wp ourselves; it’s so simple these days. I have a script which just gets into ssh and runs docker compose and dumps all the passwords. Takes seconds and currently we host around 20 wps which makes the cost per wp 0.05$ per month. Sure it can go down but it never did and if it does, we’ll survive.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > we host around 20 wps which makes the cost per wp 0.05$ per month Were are you getting servers for $1/mo?
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mizzao 5y ago

Step one: run Substack's WordPress import. Step two: done. Looks like Substack is going to get a lot of new users...

kizer 5y ago

Makes me want to write a CMS/site builder. Node? Deno? Decisions decisions.

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joeyzm 5y ago

Cached link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A0ZzHlu2-uYJ:https://rootprivileges.net/category/life-notes/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A0ZzHl...

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20220403111024/https://rootprivileges.net/2022/04/03/what-are-you-doing-wordpress-com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220403111024/https://rootprivil... https://archive.ph/orA2T https://archive.ph/orA2T

alanh 5y ago
(Context: The link appears to have disappeared, vanishing in a haze of unresolved DNS queries)
panicpanicpanic 5y ago
Thanks for sharing these links.

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alanh 5y ago

Is the DNS for this link failing to resolve for anyone else?

panicpanicpanic 5y ago
Alternate access: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30899560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30899560

mrehler 5y ago

They haven't done the best job with rolling this out, but as someone who has had a Wordpress.com Personal blog (and dreamt of moving elsewhere now and again) this new plan is VERY tempting. The part of me that wants to tinker with my site as a non-developer? SFTP and Plugin access without the headaches that come from managing all my own installation. The next tier up on the older plans wasn't good enough for its money, but I wasn't going to pay $25/mo for a business site when I don't want to sell anything through my site.

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