Have your own server or use something like Wordpress.com?

[Philip J. Fry]

Noob question but I have a VPS and am tired of maintaining it. Anyone tried running a site on Wordpress.com? Can you customise stuff on it? Is it simpler than running your own VPS? Can it scale? If it saves me dev work, I'm all for it. Plus, a VPS is like $440/year, which is more expensive if you only run 1 or 2 sites compared to Wordpress.com.

 

[secretagentdad]

I would go with WP engine if you're hell bent on wordpress.
Having passable site speed and a good neighborhood for the site is worth it.
Yes I'm saying as a general rule most cheap hosts have issues that will impact your rankings.
Yes I'm saying wordpress.com is one of those.

 

[DarkRed]

How much traffic? A $10/m VPS should work for most sites

 

[Taq]

Yes I'm saying as a general rule most cheap hosts have issues that will impact your rankings.

Could you expand on that? Are you saying a site with shared hosting may not be ranking as well as it could because it is hosted alongside questionable sites?

 

[Trump]

Just go with Cloudways bro. It's easy, fast and cheap.

Their support is surprisingly fast and good as well.

 

[KatZen]

There's a lot you can't do on wordpress.com, they lock down what you can install, etc. I'd go Cloudways or Spinupwp is pretty darn good, too.

 

[Ashk881]

Can you customise stuff on it? Is it simpler than running your own VPS? Can it scale?

All the stuff that you can do with your WordPress admin panel, you can do with wordpress.com. You just don't get root access to your instance like your vps.

It's definitely simpler. There's no woes of spinning your own vps and you don't need to deal with stuff like Manual Backups, downtimes, restarting services, security and stuff like that.

Scalibility is....."unpredictable" for the lack of a better word. Unlike a vps, you don't get access to your instance and that means you can't run benchmarks to see whats wrong or do some performance tuning for apache2 and MySQL.

I have never ran large on wordpress.com tho so can't really comment how it handles large traffic spikes.

Also for $440 a year comes out to about $35/mon. How much traffic do your sites get? And do you host anything other than just WordPress sites? Cause you're probably going overkill on the hosting plan

 

[secretagentdad]

Could you expand on that? Are you saying a site with shared hosting may not be ranking as well as it could because it is hosted alongside questionable sites?

Shit hostings hurts you in so many ways its not funny.
That and more. When it lags out cuz some other guy didnt configure wordpress right and your reseller host has no access to the hardware so your sites down for weeks......ect ect.......

I've been dolting away my life in this industry for a solid decade and wordpress and shit hosting are the unholy shit tornado of doom that has killed more rankings and money making than all of the other items I have ever dealt with put together. Now that may be because wordpress is just the most accessible distributed cms and poor people on oversold servers are bad at life but I digress. There's a giant loser of a combination out their and that's a shitty host running a bloated wordpress install, with an old and compromised php installation.
Naturally there is a budding entrepreneur in moms basement somewhere who's so sure his brilliant internet business is going to break out any day now. He did ALL THE SEO BEST PRACTICES and has managed to get ALL 3 seo plugins scores to 100!!!!