So completely happy to see WordPress.com providing a pricing tier geared toward college students that offers them free internet hosting for a yr:
WordPress.com gives the Pupil plan free, so value is rarely a barrier to studying internet abilities. The objective is for college students of any topic to create and share their ideas and work on-line, and to personal their on-line presence from the beginning.
I additionally suppose it’s method overdue. As somebody who teaches starting internet improvement, I discover that constructing a WordPress web site makes for an amazing remaining challenge to display the myriad abilities lined over the course of a semester — HTML, CSS, design, internet hosting, and so on. Internet hosting these initiatives has all the time been a roadblock although.
I’ve tried a number of othered issues through the years: Shared internet hosting plans (which units me again financially), WPSandox.io (gone bye-bye although there are alternate options), WordPress Playground (saving and sharing work is difficult), sponsored internet hosting (it’s a tough promote on a semester-by-semester foundation), and on and on.
A scholar plan with a year-long leash straight from the supply is the right resolution. You would possibly suppose that WordPress.com is just too point-and-click in comparison with a self-hosted WordPress.org web site, however dot-com gives all the identical developer affordances for instantly touching code lately.
It’s value noting that the deal is barely good for .weblog and .artwork domains. Not a deal-breaker in any way in terms of academic functions. You’ll be able to all the time level it elsewhere down the street if you wish to spend a couple of dollars.
