Yikes!

On August 3rd of 2025 I was sitting on the deck at a rental in Cape Cod and felt something on my leg. Fearing it might be a tick I was ready to crush it until I saw his cute face. He even posed for me.

Dear Subscribers

I decided to “self-host” a wordpress site because it offered complete control over the software. That has turned into a nghtmare. I spend way too much time worrying about minifying images, understanding how cloudflare works. I keep adding plugins which sometimes intefere with other plugin or in one instance brought down the whole site. I tried to improve the performance, watching YouTube videos and adding more plugins. Whew! it is a time sink.

And then there is the expense

I thought the self-hosting was going to be a cheap way to go, but was a bit shocked to realize I had spent $600 for the hosting SERVICE for 3 years. That period ends on August 7, 2027 about one more year. I will not be renewing. I’m more interested in adding content and interacting with subscribers than fine tuning my cache settings. So what am I going to do?

Is free cheap enough for you?

I started my wordpress adventure with the free version. It is hosted and maintained by Automattic. They offer upper tiers with more functionality, Wordopress itself is open-source software, or as they call it “Code for the people”.

Subscribe

I encourage readers of this site to visit my original wordpress site at https://poltrackpix.wordpress.com and subscribe. You’ll also see a donation block but that is optional. Subcriptions are free. You will get email notices when new material is posted (that can be set to whatever you want), This site will remain until my contract runs out. Think of it as the Mitch McConnell of web pages.

My Goal

My goal is to use this as a daily photo sharing site. I’ve exceeded the storage limits of my free account but I can work around that a bit by embedding code from my portfolio page. That is how the spider photo was done. Eventually I’ll probably move to a higher paid tier for some more storage, removal of advertisements and a rebranding to my domain name. If you have any questions, leave me comment.