I tried an experiment of using a self-hosted DigitalOcean-droplet-based copy of this site for a year.
It went well, but I see no advantage to that.
Or rather, there are advantages (freedom w.r.t. plugins) to that, but I didn’t use them, and don’t think I will.
Also, there were some downsides to my self-hosted instance.
DigitalOcean has a XML-RPC limitation with hosted WordPress instances, which makes interaction with them through either (1) the iOS App, or (2) writing apps like Ulysses impossible (though, to its credit, iA Writer relies on a different mechanism of application-specific passwords, and is unaffected by this).
So, it’s back to wordpress.com for me.
Caveat: there’s some problem with “re-pointing the DNS” right now, but I’m hoping that’ll be resolved soon.
Update (2/7/22):
- All good now, abacusnoir.com directs here now
- fwiw, DigitalOcean was really good, here’s a snapshot of the droplet before I turned it down:
(a 1vCPU, 1GB droplet is all you need, if you ever go down this road!)
Abacus Noir 