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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this. The only person who is paying money for a blog platform is someone who is making money from that blog. A blog that makes money needs tons of features for analytics, monetization, SEO, etc. i.e.: Not a clean and simple one.

I like the look of PIKA. But since I don't expect to make a dime from blogging, I'm not going to pay a dime to do it. Free/open/self-hosted solutions are the only ones I'll consider.

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> The only person who is paying money for a blog platform is someone who is making money from that blog.

I disagree and I’m someone who has paid for a blog platform and/or hosting for well over a decade. I don’t make a penny from my blog and I don’t even blog regularly. Some people just want a place to store their thoughts online for others even if it costs a little bit of money.

"Why would I pay $6/mo (or $60/yr) when I can self host it?!"

Because even if you went with a $5/mo droplet at DigitalOcean, you're going save what? A dollar a month, plus have to do all the maintenance of keeping it running.

I mean yeah if self hosting is more your style, go ahead, but it's weird to me that people expect free to compete with "I'm paying someone else but doing all the work myself"

I don't know if self hosting is the competitor to a paid blogging platform, rather it is social media that is the competitor. Most bloggers don't have a domain, they're publishing on Facebook and other social media, who are making a killing of these people without giving them a good damned dime back.

I can deploy my blog for free on GitHub pages.

Usually when people talk about self-hosting they are not going to put it on a separate server, but run it on their existing server that already has a lot of other software running. So it would be more like spending 20/month running 7 services instead of paying 6/month * 7.

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