A couple years ago now I decided to stop hosting any sort of public web service (like this web site) on my home computers. Residential broadband connections were still a bit flakey, upload speeds were low, and as cool as it may be to have total control over things… I didn’t want to deal with mundane day-to-day maintenance.
So I bought a few years of dirt-cheap hosting at GoDaddy and installed WordPress. This made it easy to post new info (since the browser is also the text editor in WordPress), and the GoDaddy people take care of keeping everything online.
Then I started to get comment spam. So I installed the Akismet plugin… and although I’ve continued to receive over 8000 spam comments… none have been posted.
Then as I started to post more info and pics to the page… I got worried about unrecoverable failures. So I installed the BackupWordPress plugin, which performs a backup and emails a compressed copy to my Gmail account daily.
Then I installed the WP Super Cache plugin: just because I like the idea of caching and compressing content to make the most of the precious commodity (bandwidth) while burning off the resource that’s effectively free (CPU time).
Finally, about 30 minutes ago, I found a WordPress plugin that became my new best friend. I hadn’t upgraded WP in almost 2 years… just because I thought it would be too much of a hassle… even though I knew I was running a version with bugs and known vulnerabilities (perhaps one reason I had so much comment spam). WordPress Automatic Upgrade did all the heavy lifting for me: now I’m running the latest version and all my posts and pics have remained intact!
All this software is 100% free to use, and has a vibrant community surrounding it. Although I haven’t tried any of the competitors of WP, I think WordPress is a great tool for making your own little home on the web!