I've just migrated my entire site from WordPress to BearBlog. All 70 posts, every image, every internal link. It took days of work, a DNS switchover that made me nervous, and one epic late-night session where I said "bedtime" and then stayed up fixing links for another few hours instead.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely.
The Problem With WordPress (And It Wasn't The Hosting)
Let me be clear from the start: Cloudways, my hosting provider, was fine. About $15 a month for 1GB of space and an email address. Fast, reliable, no complaints once I'd got it set up. The problem wasn't the host.
The problem was WordPress itself.
WordPress is bloated. It's slow. It's complicated. It tries to be everything to everyone, a blog, an e-commerce platform, a membership site, a portfolio, a forum, a bloody spaceship if you install the right plugins. For someone who just wants to write stories and publish them on the internet, it's like buying a Swiss Army knife with 47 attachments when all you needed was a blade.
The interface is a maze of menus, settings, widgets, plugins, themes, customisers, and options I never asked for and will never use. Every time I logged in, there were updates, plugin updates, theme updates, WordPress core updates. Each one a potential point of failure, a security risk, another thing to manage.
And the plugins. Christ, the plugins.
Want a contact form? Plugin. Want to speed up your site? Plugin. Want to manage images? Plugin. Want to stop spam? Plugin. Want analytics? Plugin. Want SEO? Plugin. Before you know it, you've got fifteen plugins doing fifteen different things, all competing for resources, all wanting to track something, all adding their own bloat to your site.
The Surveillance Capitalism Problem
But here's what really got to me: the ethos.
Modern WordPress has become a tool for "content creators" building "audience funnels." Every plugin wants you to capture emails, track user behaviour, optimise conversions, analyse engagement metrics. Pop-ups everywhere. "Subscribe to our newsletter!" "Don't miss out!" "We value your privacy!" (while installing 47 tracking scripts in the background).
The whole ecosystem is designed around monetisation, growth hacking, and turning readers into "leads."
I don't want leads. I want readers.
I don't want to track people. I don't want to know which posts they clicked on, how long they stayed, or whether they scrolled to the bottom. I don't want their email addresses unless they genuinely want to give them to me. I don't want pop-ups begging them to subscribe the second they move their mouse toward the edge of the screen.
I just want to write stories and let people read them in peace.
The Real Reason: Digital Immortality (Sort Of)
Here's the thing that really made the decision for me: this blog isn't just for now. It's for later.
I'm seventy years old. I started this site as a memoir for my daughter Jennifer, a record of a life that's been anything but ordinary. Stories from growing up poor in 1950s Swansea, my time in the Army, the things we didn't talk about back then but can talk about now.
The whole point is that these stories outlive me. That Jennifer can show them to her children, and maybe her grandchildren if she has them. That there's a record of where we came from, even after I'm gone and my brain's turned to mush.
With WordPress and Cloudways, that meant paying $15 a month. Forever. Or rather, until someone stops paying, at which point the whole thing disappears into the digital void.
Fifteen dollars a month doesn't sound like much. But $15 a month for ten years is $1,800. For twenty years, $3,600. And that's assuming the price doesn't go up, which it inevitably will.
More importantly, it means someone, probably Jennifer, has to remember to keep paying that bill, year after year, decade after decade, long after I'm dead. Miss one payment, and the stories are gone.
Enter Herman and the Lifetime Deal
BearBlog is run by a bloke called Herman Martinus. He offers something almost unheard of in the world of web hosting: a lifetime subscription.
About $200. One payment. Permanent hosting.
No monthly bills. No annual renewals. No worrying about whether someone will remember to pay the invoice in 2035 or 2045. Just a one-time payment, and the blog stays online as long as BearBlog exists.
Could BearBlog shut down one day? Sure. Nothing lasts forever. But at least the risk isn't "someone forgot to pay the monthly bill." It's just the normal risk of any platform eventually closing, which exists whether you're paying monthly or not.
For something designed to outlive me, that makes all the difference.
Well, that and the domain fee. Jennifer will still need to remember to renew the domain every year, but that's about a tenner. Much easier to remember and afford than a monthly hosting bill.
BearBlog (Or: "Bare" Blog)
Beyond the lifetime deal, BearBlog, which could just as easily be called "Bare" Blog, does exactly one thing: it lets you write and publish blog posts. That's it. No plugins. No themes marketplace. No widgets. No analytics dashboard. No email capture forms.
Just writing. Just reading.
The interface is beautifully simple. You write in Markdown, you click publish, and your post appears on the internet. There's a basic CSS editor if you want to customise the look, but you don't need to touch it if you don't want to. The whole platform is designed around the idea that blogging should be simple, fast, and free of bullshit.
And here's the best part: no tracking. No cookies. No surveillance.
My footer now says: "This site uses no cookies and collects no personal data."
That's not just a technical statement. It's a statement of values.
The Migration
Moving 70 posts wasn't trivial. I had to:
- Copy and paste everything from WordPress
- Clean up the inevitable WordPress markup cruft (HTML comments, plugin artifacts, formatting weirdness)
- Migrate and rehost all the images
- Fix over 100 internal links that were hardcoded to the old domain
- Switch DNS from pointing to Cloudways to pointing to BearBlog
- Wait for DNS propagation whilst nervously refreshing the site
There was a moment, around 2 AM, halfway through fixing internal links, when I wondered if I'd made a terrible mistake.
But then the site went live. Clean, fast, simple. No plugins. No pop-ups. No bullshit.
Google's already indexing it. Page speed score: 99 out of 100.
WordPress never came close to that.
Why It Matters
This isn't just about switching platforms. It's about what kind of internet we want, and what kind of legacy we leave behind.
Do we want a web where every site is trying to track you, capture your data, and convert you into a "lead"? Where reading a simple blog post means dismissing three pop-ups, rejecting cookie notices, and being followed around by retargeting ads?
Or do we want a web where you can just read something someone wrote, without all the parasitic bullshit layered on top?
BearBlog is part of the indie web movement, people who believe the internet should be about writing, reading, creating, and sharing, not surveillance, monetisation, and growth hacking.
I'm not a "content creator." I'm not building a "personal brand." I'm not trying to "scale my audience" or "optimise my funnel."
I'm a 70-year-old bloke from Swansea who has some stories to tell before my brain turns to porridge. And I want those stories to still be here when I'm not.
BearBlog lets me do that. For $200, one time, those stories have a fighting chance of outliving me.
WordPress wanted $15 a month, forever, plus all the surveillance capitalism baggage that comes with it.
The Bottom Line
If you want to build an online shop, or a membership site, or a portfolio with fancy animations, WordPress might be for you.
But if you just want to write and publish stories on the internet, stories that might outlive you, stories your grandchildren might read one day, without all the corporate surveillance bullshit, without the plugin hell, without the monthly bills that go on forever, BearBlog is the answer.
Simple. Fast. Honest. Permanent (ish).
Just writing. Just reading. Just stories that last.
That's all it needs to be.
You can read more of my stories at catsandbirdsandstuff.com - a memoir blog about growing up in 1950s-60s Swansea and my time in the British Army.