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.
The frontier as in the wild west frontier that existed for 1 decade between end of the civil war and the completion of the railroad. The frontier doesn't exist anymore, but people who got their start on it while it existed still do.
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