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this upgrade costs about $30 per year—about three months' worth of hosting service from a low-
cost host for a lower-volume blog (which, despite bloggers' best efforts, most blogs are).
Tapping the WordPress Community
One of the best things about WordPress.org is the WordPress community. However, this is a silver
lining that does come with a bit of a cloud.
The cloud is that the WordPress community is a handy target for Automattic to shuffle support
issues onto. Automattic doesn't take on the burden of organizing and maintaining all their input.
People are very interested in what's new. So each new version of WordPress, and whatever fea-
tures are new in it, gets a lot of “ink” online.
The trouble is that when you search for information about a feature, you can find information that
was true at one time, but that has since been superseded partly or completely in newer versions.
The WordPress community is almost entirely made up of volunteers. So there's little updating of old
posts, understandably. However, this can leave you in the position of archaeologist, digging
through comments that have accumulated in layers over the years, trying to make sure that the
information you find is accurate and current.
The solution to this is to really engage with the WordPress community—to spend time on a few
sites that seem particularly close to what you're trying to accomplish, to find meetings of
WordPress people near you, and to get to know people with more advanced knowledge. WordPress
people are generally great about this. However, it does take time and effort, and can be a bit
embarrassing when you're on the steepest part of the learning curve, always asking for help and
rarely able to help others.
Automattic and the WordPress community have engineered a good solution overall, with low costs
associated with all forms of WordPress, and a layer of professional support over many layers of
informal support from the community. However, when you fall through the professional layer, it can
take time and energy to learn your way around the layers below.
Getting the Right Host
The secret to success with WordPress.org is getting the right host. The difficulty is that you need
some time, effort, and luck to get this far. Even if you're ready and able to host the package your-
self, you might still want to “just say no” to yourself and pay for hosting instead.
WordPress hosts vary in how WordPress-friendly they are. Web hosts generally compete strongly on
costs, which makes sense; people doing an online search for a host find cost the easiest thing to
focus on. All the other aspects are more or less subjective and require a lot of reading to even begin
to evaluate.
However, the old saying, “you get what you pay for,” applies. If you can find a host that seems to
offer more in terms of WordPress support—especially if you get a personal recommendation for
such a host—it's almost certainly worth paying a bit more.
The difficulty here is that there's a chicken-and-egg problem with WordPress hosting. It will proba-
bly take you a couple of years of WordPressing to get to know people in the WordPress community,
