[benmills]

I agree with you when you're taking about web apps, but what about personal blogs?

If I just want to set up a personal blog that I don't plan on promoting or spending a lot of time on I wouldn't want to spend any extra time setting up things that don't help me with my primary goal, writing blog posts.

[bradleyland]

I totally get that. I'm beyond the phase in my life where I enjoy tinkering with blogging software settings. I'm far more interested in engaging in the conversation. But here's the counter argument: it takes a sum total of 60 seconds to implement. If you're using WordPress to host your blog, installing caching is beneath trivial. You click "Add New" under the Plugins menu, then search for WP Super Cache and click install. The only thing remaining is to turn it on.

If you're not using WP, you might use something like Tumblr or Posterous. In that case, caching isn't your problem. If you rolled your own blogging software, well, you already violated the principle that blogging is your primary goal.

[scott_s]

It's only trivial if I know that such plugins exist. And if I don't consider how to improve performance because at the moment I don't care, then it doesn't matter how trivial it is.

[bradleyland]

Hrm. That's a really good point. It's hard for me to see outside the fact that I've set up what seems like a hundred WP blogs in my lifetime. That adds a solid 5 minutes of Googling, which I still think is a pretty minimal commitment.

[scott_s]

But you don't know it's 5 minutes of Googling until you do it. Before you start, it's an unbounded task.

[benmills]

That is true. At least for personal blogging, I would use a service like Tumblr so I wouldn't have to think about any of these issues unless my blog became very popular.

[ianlevesque]

This guy has the right idea. My immediate thought when I visit a site and get "Couldn't establish database connection" is "why are they hosting this themselves?" Most people, tech savvy or not, don't need to be managing this stuff themselves.

[rellik]

FWIW, I just recently switched to self-hosting. I was on blogger before, but moved because I want to retain complete rights to my content.

[lukeschlather]

That's why I went with static HTML + Jekyll. I only deal with the moving parts when I'm uploading a blog post.

It also increases the barrier of entry to posting something, so I'm less likely to post something inadequate.