Up until very recently , I’ve been hosting this blog from a tiny Pikapod1. That worked fine, and I’d recommend it as an option for hosting your own blog for people with some basic technical skills (mostly DNS) – it’s fairly straightforward to set up and there’s few other ways host a blog for $2/month.
Recently the Australian Posters Union decided to offer WordPress hosting to donating members. Since I already donate to them it made perfect sense for me to take them up on the offer.
The Australian Posters Union are a social media co-op that runs the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances I’m on. They’re supported by voluntary donations, and I’m happy to be one of their supporters because the only path I can see that gets us away from a social media environment where we are the product is building a social media environment owned and operated by the communities it serves.
Social media co-ops offering blog hosting as well is a wonderful idea. Blogging is a good complement to micro-blogging, it can provide a space to capture the long form thoughts in a more permanent and easily referenced place, whilst more ephemeral and still developing thoughts can be shared on the Fediverse. Co-ops generally already have the infrastructure to deploy blogs on, and for most small blogs the actual load is very small and easily accommodated.
Meanwhile, it can provide bloggers with a good alternative to either the free but ad supported blog hosts, or the more expensive commercial hosting. This gives us another way to start pushing the web away from the tracker ridden, ad infested space it has become.