Ugh - coulda saw this coming 5 yrs ago when Medium was “free” and well liked
Lesson learned again and again: all blogging platforms have a limited shelf life, and there really needs to be a better way to own your own content beyond self-hosting.
WordPress.com seems to be doing just fine so far (17 years in!). They don't insert themselves between author and reader the way Medium and Substack do—unless you go looking you may never know a given blog uses them. They also still provide instructions for how to export to another host if and when you want to switch [0].
Just want to point out: creating, maintaining and hosting a blogging platform costs time and money.
The interests of anyone who wants to use a blogging platform without directly sharing those costs are very unlikely to align with those paying the costs.
(I think it can be done, but will probably be very inefficient and susceptible to being out-competed for attention.)
Some VPS providers are starting to do just that [1] with the theoretical goal of making it just a couple clicks to deploy web applications and provide automated backups. I have not personally used these services because I like to tinker and add things myself but I know that isn't for everyone.
Thanks. I'm particularly interested in providers that I can easily resell / affiliate refer through my own software products, to let casual users self-host their UGC. Bunny.net CDN (I have no association, yet anyway) is one great example of that - prepaid (so no runaway bill risk with metered services), generous referral program ($20 on first spend), and low barrier to entry ($1 minimum spend, one time, which is plenty for many UGC use cases). But their services are still limited, no compute besides DNS scripting. Linode has a nice referral program at $20 per paid signup (90 day+) and fixed prepaid cost (though recurring, unlike Bunny). Cost of entry could be lower but not bad at $5/mo. However the onboarding experience is likely still bad for all these for casual b2c users.
These are indeed similar in spirit to cPanel, only difference being a tighter integration to VM/app deployment and the whole stack being tested. It's probably a little closer to a pre-configured cloud formation and cloud-init.
Lesson learned again and again: all blogging platforms have a limited shelf life, and there really needs to be a better way to own your own content beyond self-hosting.