GoKawiilAround 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.
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