WordPress Hosting Alternatives
Blogging used to be popular over a decade ago. But these days, people prefer to consume media in other ways, namely videos on YouTube, TikTok, etc. Back in the day, I used to own a hand-crafted site on Dreamhost, but that didn’t last too long. Wordpress has come a long way and many companies now offer hosted Wordpress with automatic upgrades, free themes and plugins, etc. When I started this dividend FIRE journey three years ago, I owned a WordPress site on Bluehost. These companies often offer first-year discounts, with increasing prices after you’re locked in. Let’s take a look at how much I paid for Bluehost. Prices are in USD.
| Product | Price (Year 1) | Price (Year 2) | Price (Year 3) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wordpress Hosting | $35.40 | $35.40 | $35.40 |
| Domain Name | Free | $17.99 | $18.99 |
| Domain Privacy | $11.88 | $15.00 | $15.00 |
I paid an average of $61.69 per year. While I understand that there are infrastructure costs to run a WordPress site, this seems expensive for a static website with little traffic. I had other gripes other than cost. It was noticeable how slow the website loaded. There were times when the website was inaccessible. So I decided not to renew when my three years were up.
WordPress Hosting
I wasn’t aware of blogging platforms other than WordPress, so I looked for hosting alternatives to Bluehost. I wanted many of the same features that I received from WordPress hosting on Bluehost, but without having to pay too much. The first was Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com offers a free Wordpress blog, but if you want any customization, such as better themes or plugins, you have to pay. I was using the Visualizer plugin on my previous blog and I wanted to use something similar. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find another alternative and using the Visualizer plugin required an upgrade to their Business plan, which costs a ridiculously high $25/month.
I also looked at Hostinger and Dreamhost. Their WordPress hosting prices are similar, in the $30/year range. Similar to Bluehost, the first year of domain name registration is free. On some of these sites, companies hide how much domain name registration costs after the first year. Unlike Bluehost, domain privacy protection is included. It shouldn’t cost extra for this feature these days. No one wants their personal contact information plastered over the Internet.
I’m very technical and have deployed cloud-based infrastructure before, so I wasn’t shy about going the DIY route. I considered using AWS Lightsail to host my own WordPress blog, but the costs were slightly higher at $40/year and without domain name registration.
This exercise taught me that Bluehost was charging too much.
Domain Name Registrar
I was all set on giving up on running a blog. But then I read news about another Google project, named Google Domains, getting the axe. All Google Domains will transfer to Squarespace and Squarespace will honor the renewal price for at least another year. Google Domains offer free domain privacy protection and domain names are cheap at $12/year. That got me thinking that I could buy a domain name for 10 years, which is the maximum for Google Domains, and point the domain to a WordPress host.
I started down a Reddit rabbit hole looking for reviews and recommendations for a domain name registrar. Redditors did not like Google because not only is $12/year considered expensive, but their customer support is non-existent. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true. Other Redditors recommended companies like Namecheap, Cloudflare, and Porkbun. Domain names from these companies are cheaper and they also include domain privacy protection for free.
WordPress Alternatives
A Redditor mentioned Github Pages. For those who are not aware, GitHub is the most popular code source repository and just about every software developer in the world has an account. GitHub hosts a lot of the world’s open-source software. With a Github account, users can create a repository that can be used to store static blog content. I’ve seen Github Pages in action before, but never considered it.
Each Github user can create a maximum of one Github page. The platform that’s commonly used for Github pages is called Jekyll, which is a static site generator. Given files for all of the content in our blog, you can run software (in this case Jekyll) that generates the HTML, etc., for your website. There is even support for themes and plugins.
This all seemed promising. I already have a Github account and I’m familiar with how to manage files through the git command-line interface. Github Pages provide a subdomain for your site: <yoursite>.github.io. It also supports custom domain names, so the only optional cost is for domain name registration.
I discovered that there’s another product called Cloudflare Pages. It integrates with Github and whenever new content is pushed to Github, Cloudflare will re-build and deploy the site. Like Github Pages, Cloudflare Pages provide a subdomain for your site: <yoursite>.pages.dev. It also supports custom domain names. Cloudflare Pages offer different pricing tiers, including a free tier. The free tier offers many of the same features that paid hosting sites offer, such as unlimited requests, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited sites. The limiting factor is 500 builds per month. I don’t expect to update the site that many times a month. Cloudflare Pages also work with private Github repositories, which is an added benefit.
Further down the rabbit hole, I read complaints that Github Pages only support Jekyll and people using other static site generators, such as Hugo, were out of luck. Hugo is similar to Jekyll in that posts are written using Markdown, which is familiar to software developers. The biggest difference is the speed of the builds. Hugo is fast and can generate a 10,000-page site in 10 seconds. I don’t expect to reach that many pages. What sold Hugo for me was that I can run a Hugo server on my laptop and see content change in real time as I update files.
Everything That I Wanted
Hugo themes are available on GitHub. Installing a theme is as simple as adding a submodule in git and referencing the theme in a configuration file. Static sites generally do not have dynamic content. Since there is no database, commenting is not available. However, static site generators can integrate with third-party providers like Disqus. Finally, there is a free third-party visualization library called Plotly that can generate interactive graphs using data stored in files. I decided to build my site using Hugo, build and deploy using Cloudflare Pages, and use Cloudflare as my domain name registrar.
I launched this website from scratch in just a few hours. The only recurring cost is the annual domain name registration of $10.34/year. It provides everything that I need and I love that the website loads very fast.