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Comment by Morphling | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be negative, but why should I pay $29/year for blogging platform when I can install something like Jekyll on a free Heroku (or insert your favorite PaaS) and host my posts on another free blogging site, like Tumblr.

Basically I'm asking what's so great about Silvrback over other free alternatives?

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If you can install Jekyll or set up your own VPS and find the prospect of having to do so to have a personal blog enjoyable rather than a hassle, you're really not the target customer for these sorts of things.

So, it's convenience? Which is okay, I guess I'm just so used of setting up stuff like that, that I didn't even consider it a "restraint", but now that I think of it I can see how for some people it's not worth the time to struggle through the setup process and just pay the fee.

I wanted to start blogging and set up Octopress/Jekyll, and spent a few days choosing a theme and then playing with the colors. Granted, I was not entirely happy with how it ended up looking, and generally did not have much motivation to start writing. Looking back, there seems to be some nice themes I'd be happy with[1].

But since I do not yet have the habit of writing, any little thing that will take time from writing/publishing a blog post will interfere with a spur of inspiration.

This takes care of all my needs: no need to think about the design, no need to worry about deploying and maintaining, etc.

[1] https://github.com/imathis/octopress/wiki/3rd-Party-Octopres...

Heroku or other PaaS will crash out if you're relying on the free service and get any kind of spike.

Seriously, $29/year is nothing if you're an active blogger. It's a small fraction of most professionals' hourly rate. If you're spending any significant time writing, I'd be much more concerned about many other factors than forking out $29/year. If anything, I'd worry if it's too low, ie will it be reliable enough?

Additionally, even if you know how to install blogging software (which most writers don't of course), you'll probably underestimate the effort and you'll need to keep it updated with security patches at the least.

If you're worried about reliability, why would you use a brand new blogging platform to begin with?

Well in the case of Heroku, the free tier is really not designed for any sort of production use and the next level up is considerably more than $29/year.

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