Hello WordPress.com.
Last year I wanted to play around more with SSL certs and dedicated hosting. It was fun, but as I’ve become busier and invested more time into building stuff I don’t have the time to worry about the dozens of plugins I need to install to make my site go (Jetpack is one, natch) or keeping my server updated. I do enough of that in my day-to-day work that my personal site shouldn’t be another chore.
Money is another factor. I did some math and it wasn’t making sense to pay so much every year for my site. I was on a $600/year Media Temple plan + $175 DigiCert SSL + VaultPress + random other costs associated with running my own setup. With WordPress.com I’m now paying $299/year for everything. Hosting, a custom design upgrade, a custom domain upgrade, no site ads, a premium theme, excellent support, the works.
This doesn’t mean that I won’t be neck deep in server admin stuff. I do a lot of that for Professional Themes—I quietly have become a larger part of the company, which I’ll write about more later. It just means that instead of wasting time, I’ll actually be dogfooding WordPress.com again. Although I no longer work for Automattic, it’s imperative that I stay up to date with how WordPress.com users are using WordPress. The themes that Professional Themes launches go to .com first, and getting better insight into how people are using WordPress.com will only help us. I spend so much time on localhost that I forget 50% of the WordPress world is experiencing another kind of WordPress (.com) that I must stay up-to-date on.
So it’s goodbye Jetpack for now. I’ll surely have to deal with it via localhost as I’m doing dev work, but the days of me needing to manage it on my own site are gone, as well as the days of spending hours searching for and installing new plugins on my site when that time would be better spent on building things.
WordPress.com feels interesting now. This is the first post I’ve ever written directly on WordPress.com and directly inside of the new post screen. It feels familiar but strange, but I feel like I should get used to it. My hunch is that /wp-admin/’s days are very numbered on WordPress.com.
