Wordpress is not cheap, even on .org the hosting fee will be much more experience, and on .com the storage is not unlimited.
Squarespace does have fair prices, but unlimited (worry-free) storage. The only thing I don’t like is the block blogging.
The downsides to SquareSpace may not be downsides for many, but when they do bite, they bite hard.
- If you want more than one site, crank up your money machine.
- If you can’t find the feature you need then you’re completely screwed.
In the first case, I have two WordPress sites for specific projects as well as a general one. It doesn’t cost me three times as much as a single site. I also offered to run a site for a friend’s society, because it costs neither of us anything…
In the second case, I wanted a straightforward way to embed photos from Flickr. Sorry, not supported. I had to download every photo and upload it and manually link it back to Flickr. Yes, technically there was a “solution” but it was utterly impractical.
I’m sure I hit other brick walls, too, but it was many years ago I gave up on it.
I understand the type of hosting set up that you are talking about. Just as a word of caution, though, in a hosting set up like that if one site gets hacked or compromised every site in that hosting account is likely to get hacked or compromised.
It’s not necessarily a reason to not do it – but it is something to be aware of. You want to be extra diligent with users, passwords, etc.
And of course, if you do it with too many sites eventually you typically run into the host resource constraints. But that wouldn’t be a problem for two or three small sites.
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@Bmosbacker, I would suggest you check out micro.blog. It’s a fantastic service. They’ll be having some scheduled downtime tonight to upgrade servers but that’s a rare occurrence.
Contrary to the name, it fully supports long posts. You can write in iA Writer and publish directly to your blog. Manton has built in quite a list of features:
- Podcasts
- Add an audio narration of your post if you choose to
- Commenting in the micro.blog system has several options. It’s great but it does have limitations
- Newsletter if you subscribe to premium which costs $10 monthly, less if you pay annually
- Built-in federation with ActivityPub
- Images are no problem
- Import of your previous posts should be no problem
- Lots of crossposting options. When you make a post you can set to cross post to Medium and quite a few other services
Missing from your list, I don’t think there is an option to be notified of new posts though there is a full RSS feed and the above mentioned subscribe to posts newsletter type option so maybe that covers it?
Downsides: While there are customizable templates there are some limitations. For example I’m not sure if it’s possible to have a large header image like you currently have. There are some very nice templates to choose from but I think customizing is a bit difficult though that is getting easier.
Other upsides: There is a very friendly community of people who you can interact with and subscribe to though you’ve not mentioned that as an interest. It’s there and based on what I’ve seen you share here I think you’d really enjoy it.
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Just for fun, I will throw in a mad cap alternative. Astro - a static website generator.
https://mlevison.com - is my test website. In the next six months we will move our entire business site: agilepainrelief.com to Astro.
Benefits:
- Speed, speed and more speed
- Write in Markdown and HTML is published
- You could publish your website for free (mlevison.com is hosted on the free tier of Netifly)
https://astro.build - for all the details.
FWIW The initial setup would would require your real computer. Once created, you should be able to work from your iPad since your website is just GitHub repo.
Nerdy - yes. Geeky - why not. Effective - remarkably.
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