$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 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.
I am not technically qualified. I am a medic. I do medic things. In a pinch can open you up and fix an aortic aneurysm, and I can always make sure you're still alive when the person comes who can do those well. I am not a coder, not a sysadmin, and all I know about "web3" is that it seems to be the CrossFit for nerds.
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.
You're profoundly overestimating how 'simple' this is, or even understandable, or how much even most bloggers are interested and/or have bandwidth to understand, what these things are. Whether you're saying they'll need to understand these things is a different matter; so far that hasn't been the case, and is unlikely to be going ahead.
Understanding of technology necessary to self-host a blog (whether it’s a hobby or you’re writing full-time) is not that different from, say, knowing enough about how various components of a motorcycle work to maintain and repair your own ride (whether it’s a hobby or you do pizza delivery full-time). To deem it of no possible interest to and too difficult to understand for anyone not in the chosen minority of experienced software engineers is at best misguided, at worst elitist (when it comes from one).
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.
I can agree with you and still be baffled by that response. Knowing the tech underlying a blog and saying using an SSG on a Raspberry Pi is simple are different things.
In its core, that Pi is just a small Linux server. You're not touching the parts of it, that are different from, say, a VPS. You install a web server, you edit a file, you are done. Maybe you init a git repo and do some post-update magic, but that's not even necessary if you do it right.
If you're capable of buying a VPS you're capable of sticking a USB cable and an Ethernet cable into something.
I’d say Pi’s easier than a VPS in a number of ways.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Hosting text content online has been essentially free for two decades, and storage and bandwidth only got cheaper. $180/y is enough to serve a billion pageviews.
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.
The opposite goes for offering the storage with traffic. AWS, gcloud, azure everyone had price adjustment last year especially on the storage side of things.
Most likely, they want to make more money, and they no longer care how many free users they lose as long as some of them convert to paid customers.
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.
There's no monthly payment option. So it's never $15 a month, it's $180 a year.
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.
You're probably not the target market. Not everyone knows how to setup a server by themselves and run a blog and keep backups and keep it running and update it, etc..
here in germany you get shared hosting plus a domain name starting at 2 Euros monthly. No admin skills necessary.
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.
If the content is entirely static I see no reason it couldn’t be hosted for free. I think Cloudflare, GitHub and others offer free static site hosting.
