Around Black Friday last November, I moved my website from SiteGround to Bluehost. This was not some ambitious infrastructure decision. SiteGround wanted roughly five times more at renewal, and both providers are shared hosting anyway. Bluehost was materially cheaper and advertised 99.9% uptime, which seemed good enough on paper. For a personal website, forty-three minutes of downtime a month did not sound like a serious trade-off. I do not need elite infrastructure for a blog. But I also do not want emails from updown.io telling me the site is down, or someone complaining that it broke halfway through reading.
So I did the migration. Boy, was it painful. The dashboards tells the story well enough. The site was not catastrophically down, but it was noisy enough to keep eroding confidence. Response times varied more than I liked, and Bluehost still fell short of its advertised 99.9% uptime. None of the support interactions, including the escalation path, felt technical enough to diagnose anything properly. Bluehost did have Cloudflare integration, which at least made caching possible, but that layer was buggy enough that it never brought real peace of mind. Cheap infrastructure is only cheap while it stays boring. Once it starts demanding attention, the savings get repaid in operational friction.
Uptime Dashboard for The Blog
The Hosting Move Was Only the Trigger
Nevertheless, the migration exposed a deeper mismatch. I had known for a while that WordPress was no longer quite what I wanted. I have been using WordPress since 2007, and it served me well. It gave me publishing, an admin panel, themes, plugins, comments, feeds, and a simple way to keep writing for years. I do not have some fashionable anti-WordPress stance. It solved the right problem for a long time.
But my website today is mostly an archive, not a newspaper or a collaborative publication. It is years of writing across topics, languages, moods, eras, and levels of maturity.
WordPress is good at storing posts. It is less good, at least for how I want to work, at treating the archive as something I can inspect, reorganize, search locally, and reshape with intention.
What I Actually Wanted
The move off WordPress was not only about Bluehost. It was also about being able to work with my own writing in ways that had become awkward over time. I was drafting in Google Docs, then copying everything back into WordPress.
I wanted the site to behave less like a publishing interface and more like a body of work I could actually inspect. A long-running blog compounds, like anything else, but compounding only helps if you can see and use what is there.
I also wanted to link posts more deliberately. Over time, a site like this develops invisible connections. A post from ten years ago may contain the seed of an idea I only developed properly last year. Another may deserve a sequel, a correction, or a narrower follow-up. In WordPress, those links often stayed accidental.
The migration also forced me to treat the site as data as well as prose. I had to classify things more clearly, define categories with more intention, use tags more deliberately, and introduce a series model for posts that belong together.
What We Have So Far
That is what pushed me toward Yapress. It stands for, drum roll please, my initials plus press. That is why I am not in advertising. I used a combination of Codex, Claude, and Gemini to do it. I added it to my new launches list.
The project has gradually turned into a markdown-first publishing setup. It supports WordPress import, taxonomies, series, archives, and content validation. I had also never published anything to npm before, so this little project gave me that milestone too.
Still, the feature list is not really the point. The point is that the site now lives in files. I can search everything locally, edit it in a coding editor, version it in Git, and reorganize it without wrestling with WordPress every time. I even added a plugin system. The site is completely static, so plugins are limited to injecting code fragments rather than doing anything dynamic at runtime, but that is fine for what I need.
It also gave me a cleaner way to preserve older URLs during the migration, which mattered because I did not want to break years of links.
The Trade-Off
This was not a free move. I spent a good amount of time vibe-coding Yapress, stepping in whenever it started to choke, triple-checking links, and building a set of scripts to make sure everything worked the way it should.
WordPress still has obvious advantages. It gives me a mature admin interface, quick browser edits, a large ecosystem, and familiar conventions. Going static or markdown-first means giving up some of that convenience, especially around comments and subscriptions. I dropped comments for now, but built a plugin to handle subscriptions.
That also means more direct ownership on my side. Under these constraints, I prefer that. I would rather run a simpler system I understand than keep outsourcing understanding to a larger system that hides where the problems really are.
This is also the standard I would apply to any platform. A platform earns its keep only when it gives users a paved road that is genuinely better than rolling their own: lower friction, lower cognitive load, better defaults, safer operation. That is the modern platform engineering pitch. If the users can build a path that is just as good, or better, the platform is not helping.
That was increasingly my problem with WordPress. It still carried the constraints of a platform, but less and less of the upside. So I am not rewriting this site because I suddenly care about hyperscale blog infrastructure. I am rewriting it because the archive became the primary asset, and I wanted a setup that matched that reality.
In Consequence
I know this can look like over-engineering, but the incentives are good. I chose Next.js for now because it is easy to deploy and I already know the tooling. I could move to Cloudflare’s free tier later, but at this stage I value familiarity more than squeezing out every possible optimisation.
I also suspect this matters more now than it did five years ago.AI assistance changed the question from ‘Is this worth building?’ to ‘Is this the right thing to build?’. WordPress was always friction. What changed was the cost of replacing it. Once that drops low enough, the question then becomes not whether you can afford to change it, but whether you can justify not doing it.