Why use WordPress.com?
Why not continue using Joomla or if I’m going to switch to WordPress why not use WordPress.org and install it on my current hosting account? Why not use some other content management system (CMS) hosted on my current hosting account? Here’s why. By switching to WordPress.com, maintenance and security are provided by the good folks at WordPress.com. I don’t need to do it myself. It’s not that I can’t do it myself. It’s that I would rather do other things with my time. I will still provide the content for my blog but I won’t need to provide the maintenance of the under the covers stuff. I am very much of a DIY kind of guy so this decision was not easy.
A little background.
Over the years the method of providing my online presence has changed several times. My first go (circa 1999) at providing an online presence was to build a LAMP server. Providing an online presence was not the primary objective of this effort. The online presence was a by-product. The primary reason was to learn something about Linux and HTML. To that end I picked up a rather thick book about Linux that included a CD with a copy of Redhat Linux on it. At that time our residential ISP provided us with two dedicated IP addresses on a single connection. One IP address we used for Internet access from our various home computers. The other was unused. So I purchased a domain name from one of the registrars and pointed it at the previously unused IP address. Then I set up a Redhat LAMP server, learning as I went along.
DIY Hosting.
This worked out fairly well for a while. I was able to get a web site up and at the same time I learned a few things about Linux and HTML. Then one day I got an unexpected lesson. My server had been hacked! Apparently there was a vulnerability in the version of one Linux service that I had allowed to be set up by default on my server. In researching how this had happened and how to prevent it in the future, I came across other possible vulnerabilities in my Linux server that would require more research.
It soon became apparent to me that this maintenance and security stuff could become a full time job or at least require regular care and feeding. Since this was just a hobby for me I couldn’t guarantee that I would keep all the components up to date every time a security patch became available. By this time I had learned a little about Linux and the other LAMP components. My primary obective of this DIY hosting had been met so I started looking for other solutions to my online presents.
A hosting service seemed to be the most promising solution. Specifically WEB hosting seemed to be the best fit with my requirements. Web hosting services take on the responsibility for maintaining all the LAMP software plus they usually include email hosting as well. This would free my time up so that I could focus more on content. By giving the maintenance of Linux hosting environment over to my hosting provider I also give up some control and flexibility. For example SSL/TLS don’t work well on shared servers because the IP address for the server is usually shared as well.
I wanted to continue to use the domain name crabtrees.org that I already owned. I also wanted to customize some of the Apache configuration parameters and use my own PHP scripts. I went through several hosting providers before I settled on bluehost.com.
I chronicled various family events – mostly with photographs. I offered family members subdomains using the format firstname.crabtrees.org together with corresponding email addresses. Then one day I discovered content management systems (CMS). I looked at WordPress, Joomla, Zenphoto, Drupal and a few others that I can’t recall right now.
After reviewing these content management systems I settled on Joomla as the main CMS. Since Joomla didn’t have an acceptable photo management feature at the time I chose ZenPhoto as my photo CMS then tried to integrate the two. This went fairly well for a while also. The integration wasn’t perfect but workable.
I’ll cover my experience with this approach in a future post.
Cliff Crabtree 
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