My personal blog moved from https://tinsuke.wordpress.com to https://blog.tinsuke.com. I also brought over the modern content, and might even import the old posts, who knows.
This website is powered by Hugo and hosted on Codeberg Pages (source here).
This move isn’t motivated by the recent Wordpress vs. WP Engine feud. Although it does make the decision even easier to make.
These are my reasons:
Media Storage
WP WorPress severely limits the media storage.
I started posting my own reviews for games, just to keep my own record of played games. And I like to add screenshots, full-resolution.
For that, I started uploading my images to Postimage. It is free and works fine. But uploading media to one site and using them on WordPress, making sure to properly use thumbnails is a pain in the ass.
Also, Postimage can go bankrupt and/or disappear and I’d be left without a good alternative.
Keeping media and content on the same place (my blog’s Hugo project) and having the framework handle it all feels much better.
Ads
I don’t wanna pay to host my personal blog. It is a pet project and has basically no traffic.
With WordPress, they allowed me to have a free crappy ad powered blog: “how healthy is your prostate?” (with pictures).
Codeberg + Hugo = completetly ad/tracking/cost free.
Customizability
With a hosted WordPress blog, you can only do what WP WorPress allows you to.
With Hugo, the sky is the limit. Which brings some responsibility and the choice making burden to me, but I can take it. In truth, I like to have to learn, choose and tinker.
Flexibility
Sure, it is easy enough to export your WordPress content and use it somewhere else. But this Hugo + Codeberg combo is so much more flexible.
Hosting my blog under my own domain (paid feature on WP-land) unties me from any service provider.
Having my content on plain old Markdown makes it so easy to choose between many tools to maintaing it. Right now I’m using plain Sublime Text to write.
Codeberg Pages is straighforward enough to setup, it even has CI integration so my blog is automatically updated whenever I push to the source repo.
If I decide to use some other framework, I believe that having Markdown-native content will make it much easier to import it, without having to worry about generating an export and converting between formats.
If I decide to move from Codeberg, I could easily do a 1:1 migration GitHub Pages. Heck, my main domain page is currently hosted via GitHub. And even if I wanted to break free from Git based hosts, I could look into self-hosting with a cheap VPS.