I don’t want to be dragging the conversation into a debate. But I am trying to offer you as much information as I can. Wordpress by nature won’t give you the peace of mind you are looking for.
The problem with any hosting, they will put on a specific server, and you are asked to run the same server forever.
On the other side, when you have more control on servers, and how they are created, things go different. You can create new servers, migrate data, delete old ones. That’s up to you.
If you want to run multiple websites, then the $5 droplet won’t fit. The server won’t be capable of running them. As you move to bigger droplets, the bandwidth doubles I believe.
When purchasing a new domain today for a super secret project I realised that NameCheap also offer managed Wordpress hosting for $15/year which looks pretty much plug and play. They also offer regular shared hosting which I briefly used (and then realised I needed my own server, despite the great access they give you).
Hi, Rosemary! I’m thinking about moving my personal linkblog to a new domain and new host and BlueHost is high on the list. Plans start at $3.95/mo. for one domain, which seems inexpensive to me. What am I missing?
Aaaand I just read the fine print. There does not appear to be any try-before-you buy at Bluehost. You have to plunk down $70+ and if you don’t like it tough.
A few years back — I had three sites on bluehost. For a couple years well satisfied then got a case of the slows and downtime (pingdom). Most of the time help was good. However caught a virus through one of my plugins they were less than helpful. Did what I could to fix then said the heck with it. Oh yes, Help often took hours of waiting at the time. Old info but real info… I could add for what it’s worth.
I recently moved to Siteground. For several domains I’m working on and wanted a single place to manage them. So far the experience has been seamless. There interface is a bit wonky in my view but I can figure it out fairly quickly. I was able to get two sites up and running in about an hour.
I’m going to move my primary site from Squarespace as well this weekend. I wanted to have everything in one place so I can manage content in Mars Edit.
Kind of like my transition with Westhost. Great service when I started with them. Gradual decline over years until suddenly this summer it occurred to me my experiences with them were terrible.
I think I’m going to go with a wordpress.com blog. I don’t want to hassle with wordpress wrangling anymore.
If I pay wordpress.com $4 a month to ax the ads that’s a start. But I want to be able to install plugins and montize my site I’m up to $25. For my current rambling blog the $4 or $8 premium plan would satisfy me. But I’m plotting adding another site that will pay for itself … so.
If you don’t need more than 3Gb storage, special plugins or a custom domain, the free tier is super. (I run an ad blocker so I don’t see any ads placed on free Wordpress sites, so I don’t know what they’re like.) $48/year gets you a single basic site with 6Gb storage, custom domain, and no ads - fine for a basic blog. And for one-third less than a basic Squarespace site you get 13Gb space, and other niceties. ‘Jetpack’ SEO features exist at all tiers, with more sophisticated featuresfor a price. But if you want access to thousands of approved, supported and maintained plugins, well, that’ll bump you up to the $25/month Business tier.
Two years ago ago I remember paying $2.99/month per Wordpress.com blog, $72/year for two, actually. No plugins, just text+jpeg blogging plus mailing list sign-up, on two different domains which forwarded to the blogs. Low volume, low-use. Managed hosting was a godsend because it gave me competent regular updates, security, and backups I never had to deal with.
When I was investigating alternatives for managed hosting the best low-cost alternatives were closer to $15/month; I’d been willing to pay $100/year but those alternatives were twice that.
Full managed hosting of a site is not cheap. Wordpress.com keeps it competitively priced through sheer volume (and locking down the availability of plugins to update to enhance security and for ease of updates). Small hosts can’t easily afford to handle equivalent managed hosting at similar rates. If you’re just writing a blog, Wordpress.com managed hosting is a great deal. They give their users relatively little to work with on the free and low-cost plans, thus it gives them very little to manage or fix.
One webhost explained to me when I was looking into this that an average webhost staffer can manage 30 sites in a day (ranges between 20-50 per staff). So if taking into consideration the $5/month I was hoping to pay per hosted blog, that would have been $5x30=$150/month of gross revenue/day for that staffer, revenue that did not even cover servers, bandwidth, insurance, and costs for email/backups/spam+virus filtering, etc. In other words, untenable for most webhosts.
There are some 3rd-party companies that do Wordpress managed hosting but they tend to charge hundreds/thousands of dollars a year, and usually offer their services to business with medium-to-high traffic, to users who make an income from their site/blog.
My situation is I post a lot of links and images on social media but I want a place that’s more permanent and open to the public web. And I don’t want to hassle with managing it. For me, I think that means Wordpress.com, because everything else has an uncertain future (Tumblr, Blogger, Ghost) or is too expensive.
Wordpress also has the advantage of being scalable. If my silly little linkblog gets popular and has the potential to generate a lot of income, I can transition it back to a self-hosted platform.
The one plugin I’ll really miss is Auto Post Scheduler. It’s like buffer or the Tumblr queue, but for Wordpress. But I’ll live without it.
I was able to move from Squarespace to Wordpress with very little trouble. Squarespace has an export feature that gives you an XML file. You simply import This file into Wordpress as a “wordpress” file. Everything worked well with a few slight issues.
Images didn’t migrate - there is another process documented online for that but I didnt’ try it because I had relatively few images anyway.
Not all kinds of posts moved correctly. The biggest example for me was link posts where the post title is a link to the original article. This didn’t make it over into Wordpress for some reason. I just went back and edited those link posts (I had about 10 in total, so a manual change was okay).
Overall I think if you have a fairly simple Squarespace site you can make the move quickly. it took me about an hour in total including the manual adjustments mentioned above. Biggest problem with WP is finding a good template - you can really go down a rat hole on that subject.
you guys are just too good at giving examples of web hosting - how am I to decide 
