[firasd]

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]

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]

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]

> 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]

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]

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.