WordPress as a Self-Hosting Platform

Leaving the current drama around WordPress.org aside for now, I believe that there is a use case for WordPress that is heavily underutilized: Using WordPress as a platform for self-hosting.

When people think WordPress, they think publishing platform. And, of course, that’s its nature. It was built for expressing yourself publicly on the internet. But as we have seen over the years, it is also a pretty good framework on which—through its plugin system—almost anything can be built on top of it.

This is especially interesting considering that you can get WordPress hosting easily and for cheap. Even NAS systems like Synology or QNAP support installing WordPress on them.

There are so many services on the internet that have self-hosting options. An interesting website about this is selfh.st. It’s a compilation of different apps, amongst others:

• RSS Readers,
• Photo Management,
• Bookmarking,
• Recipes,
• and around 165 more categories.

A downside of this plethora of self-hosting apps is that they each have their unique software stack and requirements. While this complexity can be alleviated with virtualization solutions like Docker, it means that with every additional app, the hardware requirements for your host go up.

When using WordPress as a basis for self-hosting, the software requirements for all plugins are about the same, namely PHP and MySQL. This means as soon as you have WordPress hosting, you have your basis for self-hosting, without having to go through software requirements.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, WordPress out of the box is open and public. Thus, if you want to self-host just for yourself (and friends and family, i.e. logged-in users), the first step needs to be to install a “Private WordPress” plugin.

Then, also, there are not yet many plugins that provide a self-host experience. While I am only doing this on the side (for now), I am working on changing this by building more of these plugins.

I recently realized that this was a big part of what I am trying to do with my Friends plugin. While it even has a public component (you might reblog what you read in it), I framed it as the center of your online activity.

From a self-host perspective, it’s a combined RSS Reader with a publishing platform that has ActivityPub support (thus making it a full Mastodon instance), e-mail and keyword notifications, post format support, etc.

Additionally, its independence from major third-party social networks is equivalent to the goals of self-hosting. It can’t be shutdown on you because the service was bought or turned out to be not profitable enough. Also, you can choose where to host it.

So what does WordPress offer for self-hosting yet? Maybe let’s just revisit what I build and am using myself. These are all WordPress plugins:

• RSS Reader: Friends
• Bookmarking: Post Collection
• Read it Later: Send to E-Reader
• Wiki: Family Wiki
• Private Family Blog: just WordPress, with a forked Network Privacy plugin
• Mastodon Apps Compatibility: Enable Mastodon Apps

For Bookmarking, I also have ported my old project thinkery.me to a Thinkery WordPress plugin, hopefully I’ll have time to give it the finishing touches.

I would love to store my family’s recipies in such a WordPress environment, too.

While self-hosting photo management also sounds tempting, I actually think that a private family blog is a superior alternative. We’re drowning in photos and videos, but being able to keep them along with a title and a story is much better than the endless streams in Google Photos and the like.

I don’t know whether WordPress will ever offer as large a selection of self-hosted apps as WordPress plugins. But I do think that it’s a path worth following. It might not be a nerd’s favorite choice, but easy hosting and administration could allow WordPress to democratize self-hosting next.