Steven Rosenberg wrote an interesting post about being somewhat inclined to move his blog to WordPress for the built-in commenting system, but being dissatisfied with the hosting options. I posted my own solution as a suggestion (comment pending approval at press time), but I thought I would expand a bit here.

I host both this site and The New Leaf Journal on a Hetzer VPS server. It costs between $5-6 per month with a little bit of extra storage. I manage the server with Cloudron’s free plan. Cloudron provides a robust server management UI and automatically configures WordPress (and optionally Redis). It has an excellent built-in file manager and domain management system. Otherwise, it stays out of the way and allows me to manage my WordPress sites as if it were not there. There are a few caveats. Firstly, Cloudron itself requires some server resources. Secondly, Cloudron is, at its core, a paid service, and I suppose the terms of its free plan could change any time (I would probably consider the paid plan to be cost-prohibitive for my use-case, especially since I would need a more expensive server to take advantage of being able to host more public-facing apps).

(For those interested, I wrote an article about using the free version of the UpdraftPlus plugin to “move” The New Leaf Journal from Bluehost to Hetzner back in 2022. I used the same process to move from a bigger Hetzner VPS to a smaller one back in 2024.)

Another solution is Pikapods. Pikapods provides paid hosting for individual docker apps. WordPress starts at $1.70 per month, but can be more expensive depending on how much CPU, RAM, and storage the user gives to the WordPress pod. I use Pikapods for Miniflux and Wallabag (not WordPress, although I did briefly test a WordPress install) and have had good experiences with it thus far. It does not have a management UI, but does allow SFTP access to the app’s files. There are quick and easy directions for connecting the WordPress install (or any PikaPods app) to a custom domain.