I know it sounds silly, but I used fully hosted WordPress.com for blogging long before I got into web development, so I didn’t see a need to learn PHP and navigate web hosting when I could just run WordPress sites on their hosting platform for free. The deeper I got into web development, however, the more I ran into barriers to customization and capability. This makes sense, since such a quality platform would not be sustainable as a business model without paid service tiers.
Confession: this portfolio website is still hosted on WordPress.com and will remain so until the end of the school year. The convenience factor outweighs the relatively small upfront fee to transfer my previous WP experience to a usable working portfolio. However, now that I am well-versed in coding and cloud-hosting, I plan to tackle the supposed headache of migrating this site off of WordPress hosting and maintain it on my own. Because as a Cloud-Happy Web Developer, it just feels wrong to be partaking of a service that wants me to upgrade to a business account for something so simple as Hello Dolly. Especially when it comes auto-loaded on the software itself.
Give me whimsy or give me…not death, but…um…how about…self-hosting!
