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If you're paying wordpress.com $300/year for all their features, I can highly recommend switching to AWS Lightsail for 90% savings. Exorbitant pricing.

moooo99 3y ago
One may complain about the prices for specific SaaS offerings, but mentioning Lightsail as a alterantive to a completely managed offer is not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
- drusepth 3y ago
  Lightsail is a pretty good middleground between fully-managed and fully-self-hosted, though. One of my WP blogs is on Lightsail and it was <5 minutes to set up and be ready; and TBH I'm pretty darn devops-challenged.
lemonberry 3y ago
Not sure who your comment is targeted to, but I've been working with a friend's mom - 55ish - on her WordPress website. With no tech experience she was able to spin up a site with a custom domain and get very close to launching but got bogged down in some WooCommerce details. She was also using Elementor which seemed to not play nice with WordPress.com's hosting. I suspect this is why Elementor now has their own hosting. My point: this highly motivated but completely inexperienced woman was able to build a website on her own and get very close to launching. I have no experience with AWS Lightsail. I'm sure it's a fine platform, but to me WordPress.com is really making the web accessible to a lot of people that otherwise wouldn't have access. Maybe it's not worth it to many with a tech background, but for her, WordPress.com is making her dreams come true.
- suddenclarity 3y ago
  I haven't used Wordpress in over a decade but one major selling point back then was the security. Standalone installations were hacked left and right. Often because you postponed updating. They sorted that for you.
simonw 3y ago
I got burned by Lightsail: did you know that if your instance exceeds its CPU "burst" quote for too long they disable the instance, without offering a clear way to get it working again? Some notes on how I recovered from that here: https://til.simonwillison.net/aws/recovering-lightsail-data https://til.simonwillison.net/aws/recovering-lightsail-data Maybe they've fixed that issue now? This happened to me in 2021.

moooo99 3y ago

One may complain about the prices for specific SaaS offerings, but mentioning Lightsail as a alterantive to a completely managed offer is not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

drusepth 3y ago
Lightsail is a pretty good middleground between fully-managed and fully-self-hosted, though. One of my WP blogs is on Lightsail and it was <5 minutes to set up and be ready; and TBH I'm pretty darn devops-challenged.

lemonberry 3y ago

Not sure who your comment is targeted to, but I've been working with a friend's mom - 55ish - on her WordPress website. With no tech experience she was able to spin up a site with a custom domain and get very close to launching but got bogged down in some WooCommerce details. She was also using Elementor which seemed to not play nice with WordPress.com's hosting. I suspect this is why Elementor now has their own hosting. My point: this highly motivated but completely inexperienced woman was able to build a website on her own and get very close to launching. I have no experience with AWS Lightsail. I'm sure it's a fine platform, but to me WordPress.com is really making the web accessible to a lot of people that otherwise wouldn't have access. Maybe it's not worth it to many with a tech background, but for her, WordPress.com is making her dreams come true.

suddenclarity 3y ago
I haven't used Wordpress in over a decade but one major selling point back then was the security. Standalone installations were hacked left and right. Often because you postponed updating. They sorted that for you.

simonw 3y ago

I got burned by Lightsail: did you know that if your instance exceeds its CPU "burst" quote for too long they disable the instance, without offering a clear way to get it working again? Some notes on how I recovered from that here: https://til.simonwillison.net/aws/recovering-lightsail-data https://til.simonwillison.net/aws/recovering-lightsail-data Maybe they've fixed that issue now? This happened to me in 2021.