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At some point I suspect the “self-hosted” kind of Wordpress which many think of as “real” blogging — downloading/installing on your own server — will be a historical curiosity option. Like people running 8-bit DOS games in emulators. It is already no longer a serious option.
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Back when I used shared-server ISP (Dreamhost), they were pressing me to upgrade to a “personal server” (a VM basically). I saw that as a sign they’d eventually either charge for admin services or force you to admin a VM. Which is what you’d do today (likely on Digital Ocean)
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For those who’ve never run a serious site, this is the equivalent of having to self-checkout and bag your own groceries. Instead of just doing light admin on the specific website software, you’d do heavier admin: server OS upgrades, web server configuration etc. Not fun.
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So I sucked it up and moved to a 10x costlier solution in 2014. Instead of a $10/mo shared server, I ended up on a $100/mo managed WPengine account. Usually, I end up with $50-150/mo in overage charges since our traffic is above the band we’re in but not yet at next level
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Today the “self-hosted” alternative for ribbonfarm would probably be a $20/mo Digital Ocean droplet with 10x the admin time and knowledge than I needed to run things on Dreamhost in 2012. Basically out of the question. Cloudy app-level managed Wordpress is the only game in town.
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For a new blogger with no tech skills, I don’t think self-hosted Wordpress is an option at all. As an engineer, but not a s/w engineer, I at least had basic Unix shell and PHP scripting skills, and understood the basics of server-side infrastructure, enough for 2007 indie ops.
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Quite unsurprisingly many new, non-techie bloggers don’t even understand what self-hosted means. They don’t know there’s an open-source project behind Wordpress.com (a private platform run by Automattic, a private company) or what it means to run your own “copy”.
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It’s as bizarre-sounding to them as “running my own google or Facebook”. Their mental model of blogging is *communatarian by default* lacking even awareness of the individualist option, let alone seeing brave digital homesteading as the default, like we did 10 years ago.
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This has implications. It means only the more social/civilized type of writer, willing to *start* on a shared private community/aggregator environment like Medium or Wordpress.com, will get into blogging. Wild West pioneer-settler era is over. The townies are moving in.
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I think you underestimate Medium for ppl getting started. They bring attention which is the oxygen you need in the early days. With some technical help I found the move from medium to Wordpress pretty seamless, incl. redirecting all the URLs via DNS
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Yes but you're much more of a townie blogger, in it to build a well-defined niche audience (productivity) efficiently and a real business etc. You're the kind of person Medium is designed for.
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That’s true but I guess I don’t know what you mean by a frontier blogger. I mostly associate old self hosted sites with people who are so established they don’t need to keep up. But they are hardly the frontier
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People who started before twitter and facebook became the primary distribution channels, RSS was still alive, and there was a brief window of opportunity (about 8 years, I got in at tail end in 2007) who wouldn't have gotten in the game at all without that degree of control.
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