I have a blog hosting network called solanin, created primarily for my friends that needed a place to blog and not worry about the overhead of maintaining their own WordPress instance. It has been fun running it, and I am happy that my peeps have a place to call home on the web.
solanin will be closing, for two primary reasons. First, there were some lessons I’ve learned since setting it up, and I wish I had done some things differently. Some of the changes are technical, but most of them are on the administrative side of the “business”. I send out invoices, for instance. It hadn’t occurred to me how bad of an idea that was, but at the time there weren’t options like Stripe or other payment systems that I could easily tap into (please, someone, anyone, pay me with bitcoin!). I began dreading invoice time, which is quarterly for me, because while I have my larger projects and clients, the little invoices were a cognitive drain. I will get to how I solved that issue in a moment.
The second, and much more pressing issue, is that the hosting provider I’ve used for solanin has begun a downward spiral of bad service and worst customer support. I need to get my sites moved away with the quickness, and in the next few months I expect to have everyone migrated into the new network, on solid infrastructure that I am more involved with in the daily operations. I suppose a larger lesson for me has been how much my skill- and knowledge-set overlap with managed WordPress hosts; over the last year I’ve worked more to correct the issues of hosts than was worth the money I’ve paid them. Hmmm.
The new network is called slowpress. The name is a nod to the slow movement, as in web, food and money, among others. It isn’t a downgrade or “lite” version of anything I am doing now, and it certainly isn’t slow loading. Rather, it is a particular WordPress configuration that makes certain presumptions for things such as not tracking visitors and passing that information to corporate silos, or accessing the backend over a secure connection. Those are the technical bits, but I will also introduce it as a subscription, so folks can pay me monthly or annually and I won’t need to send the average of 14 notices a year to get a small amount of money from folks.
slowpress isn’t for everyone, but I have a hunch it is for most individuals. 
I will be writing more about slowpress in the coming months, so be on the lookout for that. If you are a current solanin hoster and have questions, let me know.
That image is from the graphic novel Solanin by Inio Asano. I named the network after it, because that book touched me, and that specific image shows the spirit of the network. If you are near me, you can borrow my copy. The more you know!