Ah, I got it. Yeah, it makes sense, WP.com is moderately likely to keep working fine probably, it’s just that it would make me nervous at this stage. I just don’t think he can do anything to really “punish” Bluehost if they’re using his software in some way that displeases him. WPEngine’s mistake was getting tangled up into a business relationship where they were depending on listings and APIs and things. Although, it probably seemed like a good idea until their business counterpart went off the deep end.

Yeah but why would the company run by the crazy person be the only safe place?

It’s open source. Just find a different host that isn’t run by a known unstable human. Literally any other. That would be my feeling on it, at least.

Yes yes this is a very good point, stay well clear of Wordpress.com, Automattic, or any similar nonsense. All I meant by “Wordpress hosting” was managed hosting from some third-party place like Bluehost or Hostinger. The software is fine, it’s all open source and the worst that will happen is 6 months from now, it’s not getting a lot of feature updates because the core company that was making it has imploded completely, and someone from the community has taken over security updates.

But yes you need to stay clear of the clusterfuck while it’s going on. Don’t use Wordpress.com or anything adjacent to it.

Edit: Wait, I didn’t even read closely enough. Why would Wordpress.com be safe? I had some vague impression it was connected with Automattic in some way, although I’m not sure, maybe it is just one of the third-party companies. I just feel like anything that’s in any way adjacent to Automattic or anything “official” about Wordpress would be best avoided for a while.

Yeah. I’ve run plenty of services from a computer sitting in someone’s office, or in my living room, while they’re in-production-while-in-development. Sometimes it makes sense. But it’s just not something you want to deliberately aim for as the solution. What if the power goes out? What if your motherboard dies? What if the toilet overflows when you’re not there, and floods the place?

Just get a dedicated service and pay them their $10/month and have them worry about all that crap for you.

It’ll be vastly cheaper and easier to just get hosting somewhere.

Wordpress hosting is fine for most small businesses and starts at about $10/mo. You can go fancier and more reliable and go up to $30/mo or something, or if you really need your own VPS you can go with Vultr or Hostinger and get a pretty similar price range for pretty much whatever you want to do.

I think the only reason to self-host is if you have some crazy special hardware or legal issue, or your own dev stuff that you don’t want/need to push to “the cloud” to put it online. Otherwise it’s such a buyer’s-choice market that it’s hard to justify.