Is any commercial content allowed?
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hi veltis —
Good luck with your search.
One other thing about running standalone is if you have any technical trouble many web hosts will not help you with WordPress even if they “provide” an easy install route.
The first thing they’ll tell you is to remove all your plugins — which usually means remove all the functionality and personality of your blog — and then see how things go because they know there are plugin conflicts out there and, perhaps, some bad plugin code and they don’t want to hunt down the problem for you.
So you try to figure out what’s causing your site to crash or not respond and it can take a long time to test different “feature sets” and that doesn’t mean you’ll ever find out what went wrong. Perhaps it was the latest security update that tweaked something the wrong way.
Many times you’ll be told to save your database and reinstall WordPress fresh from zero. That can be a daunting task to any inexperienced user.
I realize there can be confusion here between .org and .com and VIP and free hosting and paid upgrades like CSS and domain mapping where money exchanges hands for “free” hosting and my advice is to directly ask support for a ruling and not open up a discussion with people who don’t have the power to decide your fate.
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Most web hosts know zip about WordPress and, as boles discovered, there’s little point asking them for support if things do go wrong; better just to head straight for the forums. If that bothers you, I would suggest going with a reseller that specialises in wordpress blogs, such as freshlypressed.net. The folks over at wp.org should be able to give you some more suggestions.
As far as commercial content on wp.com is concerned, I think my line is the same as most people; I don’t see why anyone should make money out of something they’re getting for free. Where I perhaps deviate is that I have no objection to people using wp.com for commercial purposes as long as they pay for the privilege. Like the VIP blogs, and whatever donation Scoble’s honour dictated ;) If wordpress.com were to offer a small business hosting package in future (probably more trouble to set up than it’s worth in traffic and income terms, but I could be wrong) I would have no issues with that, but until they do businesses need to find alternative hosting options.
I also think it’s slightly cheap using wordpress.com to blog about your business rather than doing it on your own space, and any business doing so would lose a fair bit of credibility with me.
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Most web hosts know zip about WordPress and, as boles discovered, there’s little point asking them for support if things do go wrong; better just to head straight for the forums.
That’s true for pretty much ever software package out there. Most hosts (even me) include it in their TOS.
Although I usually know enough or how to search the support forum of the software in question to find the answer 90% of the time.
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I disagree. With the growing competition, free rides aren’t much of a big deal. The whole bunch of information you are getting out here is also a free ride. What is your say on that? The whole of internet revolution is also a free ride to most of us who know nothing about it. All the essays I can read in the internet also falls under a free ride to me-I never paid to read. So, what is your say on this?
And, the blog hosts are also not doing this out of utter generosity. Yes, it is optimal to have people pay a price so that the basic economic theory works but hey…when the members of wordpress can benefit(of course assuming the security issues to be of no threat), what is the harm in allowing them to earn?
I strongly feel that wordpress should change its stringent rules over time to suit the demands of people and also to match the rivals.
All you guys out here who do not want to commercialize your blogs are never forced to commercialize. So, what is the big hue n cry?
As much as I would love to stick with wordpress, I felt like, if I can earn some extra dimes out of my writings, why not give it a shot? I moved from blogger to wordpress and I am re-activating blogger account…all but for the same reason.
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The only reason Google lets you have adsense on free Blogger blogs is because they own adsense and the more units they get out there, the better it is for them. There are also multiple sites which give you a share of the adsense revenue they’re making from your blog, if that’s your bag. If you’re out to make a couple of extra cents without having to spend any, it’s not like you don’t have other options.
There are multiple reasons why people leave wordpress.com and yes, not being able to monetize their blogs is one of them. They are also people who sign up because they don’t want ads plastered all over their blogs. Mostly, there are various historical reasons why commercialisation of wordpress is a sensitive issue and Automattic has to tread carefully on this.
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indeed. google makes more money than bloggers do for every clickthrough on those adsense blocks. it’s unreasonable to expect wordpress to give you adsense for no benefit to them.
there are hosts out there who will hold your hand with wordpress. my situation isn’t ideal, but there are hosts (freshlypressed.net) which are headed by people very acquainted with worpress.
and running wordpress on your own isn’t hard. i’ve learned and hacked a lot _since_ i installed it, but when i installed it, i knew next to nothing.
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I’ve been considering raincoaster’s point of view above in terms of personally defining what I believe to be “commercial”:
The articles themselves were worthwhile and while they are obviously a PR activity, they’re not commercial so much as professional. Does that distinction make sense? There is no transaction is what I mean.
Yes, this does make sense to me. I certainly support global information sharing. And I think one of the most wonderful aspects of the internet is the fact that information is shared without the expectation of financial gain.
IMO if your blog post articles are all aimed at driving business to your “affiliates” or to your own business ventures, or if in fact you only have a blog in order to pimp it to make a buck then your blog would be better placed in self hosting or web hosting with a wordpress.org template.
As far as all the dialogue about the quality of hosting goes we know at the very least that one host whom wank and sunburntkamel have identified can offer quality wordpress support for an affordable fee. But more to the point IMO it’s up to people in business to make their own arrangements to secure both the goods and services they need to remain in business. Hence IMO whether or not the blogger can cope with wordpress technology or whether or not most web hosts know how wordpress works and can provide their clients with effective support really has no legitimate place in this discussion.
IMO in accord with the words in the ToS and the underlying intent there should be no business transactions of any kind conducted on a wordpress.com blog. Setting aside VIP accounts which I have no problem with, IMO the wordpress.com blogging community ought to be comprised of those for whom blogging is a passion. And the wordpress.org community ought to be comprised of those who blog for profit and/or a variety of other reasons.
Relaxation of the policy interpretation is also likely to give rise to an influx of new bloggers from the legions out there who want to game the search engines, go SEO optimization competition crazy, and spam their blogs with ads all for a dubious few bucks a month. On top of that, within the inflow we will probably find blog scrapers who create no content of their own and have strings of blogs acting as prostitutes for gaining minimal ad revenue.
Relaxation of the boundaries of policy interpretation will also mean that the members of the community who do answer questions on the forum will be helping those folks whom they do not believe ought to be given a legitimate place in the wordpress.com community in the first place. This will do more to unravel community than it does to knit it together.
wank said:
Mostly, there are various historical reasons why commercialisation of wordpress is a sensitive issue and Automattic has to tread carefully on this.
Although I know that ToS policy must allow for staff discretion and I have no issues with that, I would like to see Automattic clarify the policy on this in a manner that demonstrates respect for the history wank points to.
My thanks to Veltis for giving us an opportunity to speak to this important issue. And I hope others will also choose to enter the dialogue.
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vertis, the constant technical maintenance challenges of WordPress suggested by boles likely largely relates to both the fantastic quantity of content and his very large audience. As raincoaster describes many people are able to just have WordPress set up and work.
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Right you are, Lloyd! With WordPress.com I just let the blog happen and I can concentrate on content and writing cogent replies and the planning and execution of future articles. My blog is more discussion forum where we, at times, basically hold real-time conversations so things get heavy and intensive fast.
In my standalone setup everything would sometimes crawl and slow down to the outrage of my readers.
Reading the support issues that were detailed elsewhere here about the November slowness on WP.com because of a MySQL cache problem, I am rather convinced that was part of my problem while being standalone because my web host service mumbled something about that during one of many support phone calls.
My problem was MySQL would not clear its cache properly and not even a server reboot will force that cache to clear. You have to dig in at the root level and manually clear it yourself and if you don’t have a lot of memory dedicated to MySQL that cache can load up quickly and need to empty regularly as well.
So… if you’re busy and lots of readers are reading and commenting and pages are being loaded all over the place you being to get progressively slower and slower until everything stops and then magically comes back 10 minutes later. By that time, however, the heat is gone and the discussion has waned and surfing readers have gone away forever.
WordPress itself — here and standalone — is well made and hardy and I’ve never had any blogging problem with the WP software. My problems have been with the hosted database and plugins that never really get resolved.
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