WordPress walks back (some) changes
Thanks to a link from Aywren, I see that WordPress have undone some of their recent disastrous changes.
The newly introduced limits on how many people are allowed to view your blog each month (!) are gone again… at least for now.
Remaining are the large reduction in storage for free plans (now reduced by two-thirds, instead of five-sixths), and the large monetary gap between the free plan and the cheapest paid plan.
Even if the storage reduction is largely undone, WordPress have destroyed a lot of trust and goodwill in exchange for… I’m not sure what gains. People who were previously on the cheaper paid plans will be looking around at alternatives, and those on the free plans will be keeping alert for opportunities to move away from a provider that has demonstrated a willingness to change things so fundamentally, and without notice.
There has been no mention of restoring any of the cheaper paid plans that used to be offered.
Anyone looking to move up from the current free plan is probably better advised to either move to Blogger and stay free and with better storage, or to seek out one of the many other hosting options out there. Another option would be to accept the new more expensive plan and see if the ad revenue you receive offsets that cost down to something reasonable – this won’t suit everyone though.
Scent of a Gamer 
Sounds like a wait and see what the options are to purchase more storage actually het offered. In the meantime, I’ll continue to explore the self hosting option as well as blogger.
Then there is always the stop-gap of just going in and deleting old storage and posts. This will work to weed out the stuff I posted before I found my blogging niche! But this process will only work until I refill the storage bucket.
Hopefully, they’ll make the options to upgrade storage reasonable. If not I will really miss this community.
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Reblogged this on Dragons of Lancasm and commented:
Wordpress still has no official annoucement of its plan & price changes – no email to customers, no message on our dashboards. The large amount of “feedback” (almost entirely complaints) has led them to give us back a few of the things we had before April.
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I’d been planning an update based on all I seen and read, but you’ve covered it all for me! We still need more detail from them, but I think they’ve lost peoples trust now whatever they do.
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Yes it’s going to be difficult to plan and schedule with confidence when they have shown they are happy to change or remove ongoing plans without any notice
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I will probably leave after my subscription has ended. Trust is a big issue that they have not turned around.
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I evidently live in a hole … I have a paid subscription so maybe I haven’t noticed and will do when the time comes to repay.
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If you check out the plan page you will see that your current plan is no longer offered. At least for now
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Mine still says 3gb for free?
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Yes they changed the display for ongoing free plans as those are keeping their 3Gb for now
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I have premium anyway so maybe it won’t make a difference
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I know a number of the Premium feature were changed so it’s best to check and see if that still suits
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I most definitely will. I suppose this issue is a bit like the photobucket fiasco a few years ago. That caused loads of people to jump ship.
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That is exactly what it reminded me of
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You would think other places would learn from the examples of formerly popular sites that went back on their core mission, lost their customers, and were quickly replaced.
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Haven’t had a chance yet to catch up. Hopefully they didn’t close that thread yet, but as I mentioned earlier, I’ll resub my grandfathered-in personal plan for a year to give me some breathing room for a final decision and to see how the various options for people pan out. I’m sure that WP being WP, they’ll royally f something else up in the next 12 months, so I don’t see it as a long-term solution – and I’m sure the grandfathering will only last so long at best anyway – all my trust is gone!
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That’s it, there’s no reason to trust their assurances when they have already shown a willingness to radically change or remove plans without notice.
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Thanks for the update, Dave. I think this buys me some time to see how this all shakes out without having to take emergency action (which is a relief). It is a shame they’ve gotten greedy as they probably make a fair bit of money off people like us who drive a lot of ad revenue to them with our humble websites. They’re going to lose a lot of that in the future and overcharging the remaining people isn’t going to offset that I don’t think.
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That’s my feeling too. I will most likely move on from WordPress but the previous urgency isn’t there at the moment, so I can take my time choosing
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A know some time has elapsed since this was first posted, and I’m always late to the party, but WordPress do now have a Starter Plan at 5GBP per month for 6GB of storage, which might help some!
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Yes I saw that one go up. The general response from people who used to be on cheaper plans is that it’s nice but no longer removes the WP ads like the cheaper plans used to.
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