4 ms·

I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but

by firasd 2mo ago

I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks

pitchlatte 2mo ago
given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.
- drdexebtjl 2mo ago
  Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it. Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0. If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
  - gertop 2mo ago
    > Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. There are literally thousands of PHP hosting providers. There are also dozens, possibly hundreds of deviated wordpress hosting services, aside from WordPress.com.
    - drdexebtjl 2mo ago
      Your point being? These thousands of hosting providers all charge around $5 or more to host your Wordpress instance, because that’s what it actually costs to run Wordpress. A more modern CMS can bring costs down by serving pages from a CDN cache and, most importantly, selectively re-rendering only pages that changed. This is hard to do with Wordpress because plugins can essentially render anything and depend on any data.
carlosjobim 2mo ago
Yes, that's what it is. Even worse if you want to get paid through subscriptions. Although Ghost blog might be a good middle option.
throwaway219450 2mo ago
A custom domain and GitHub hosting has been fine for me. You pay the time cost of setting up a static site, but I’d take that over Wordpress. Writing articles is a markdown file and a push. If you need to draft in private, keep it offline. It gives me a place where I can keep a resume and a portfolio, I control the design and I don’t pay for traffic. You don’t even need a custom domain name. A different kingdom to be sure, but you can always pack your bags and push the repository elsewhere. There’s something quite pleasing about having everything handled in git too.

by firasd 2mo ago

pitchlatte 2mo ago

given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.

drdexebtjl 2mo ago
Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it. Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0. If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
- gertop 2mo ago
  > Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. There are literally thousands of PHP hosting providers. There are also dozens, possibly hundreds of deviated wordpress hosting services, aside from WordPress.com.
  - drdexebtjl 2mo ago
    Your point being? These thousands of hosting providers all charge around $5 or more to host your Wordpress instance, because that’s what it actually costs to run Wordpress. A more modern CMS can bring costs down by serving pages from a CDN cache and, most importantly, selectively re-rendering only pages that changed. This is hard to do with Wordpress because plugins can essentially render anything and depend on any data.

carlosjobim 2mo ago

Yes, that's what it is. Even worse if you want to get paid through subscriptions. Although Ghost blog might be a good middle option.

throwaway219450 2mo ago

A custom domain and GitHub hosting has been fine for me. You pay the time cost of setting up a static site, but I’d take that over Wordpress. Writing articles is a markdown file and a push. If you need to draft in private, keep it offline. It gives me a place where I can keep a resume and a portfolio, I control the design and I don’t pay for traffic. You don’t even need a custom domain name. A different kingdom to be sure, but you can always pack your bags and push the repository elsewhere. There’s something quite pleasing about having everything handled in git too.