I found Write Freely, because I am looking for a privacy focused blog. But I am a little confused about the differences between write.as and Write Freely.
I am not able to self-host anything (I guess). I was able to run WordPress on a rent-webspace but looks like I need more admin-super-user-access-things to install Write Freely!? At least it looks like this for a non-technician like me, that I need deep access to a server.
Thats the reason I am interested in the managed-host-part of Write Freely which is write.as - am I right?
But to be honest: I have doubt about the privacy part there. Where does the server stand? USA I guess? Furthermore I saw some connections to cloudfront (= Amazon) during the registration. And I am confused about the compatibility of privacy and this things.
Yes, WriteFreely requires you to be able to run an executable on a server, which usually isn’t available with a shared host. There are options out there, though, like YunoHost, which makes hosting WriteFreely easier.
Yes, Write.as is the managed hosting service run by the same people who develop WriteFreely (us). However, there are other companies that provide WriteFreely hosting too, all outside of the US:
All Write.as data is hosted in the US, through Rackspace. We self-host everything, from our analytics to our fonts (no Google Analytics or Fonts), and we use CloudFront to speed up certain parts of the site, like our font files.
I understand the downsides of hosting in the US, especially if you live outside of it, and I know everyone’s threat profile will be different in that regard. But our Privacy Policy is the best place to find how we handle things like government requests for data, etc. Let me know if I can clear up anything in particular there.
I have tested some servers of USA vs London / UK and the difference is usually milliseconds. As all my blogs are text-based, most readers won’t notice a difference. I have never had an issue with loading times.
first of all: thank you for taking time to answer my questions in detail. Your post helped me a lot.
YunoHost looks like a perfect help for people like me who are willing to learn some technical stuff but are no passionate system administrators for years. In fact I rent a small VPS a few minutes ago and will try to install YunoHost and then WriteFreely.
Thanks for all that information. And yes, if you are interested in privacy, from a european view hosting in the US is a problem. Looks like you do what you can to tone down all the things which come along with hosting there. But of course even you are binded to laws you can not change and unfortunatley this laws are not privacy-friendly at all. And even if they were, Snowden showed the world some intelligence in the US don’t care about laws.
But again: thanks for your answer, for your time and the whole project here. I will stick to it and guess I will flood the support-forums the next days and cry for help to get things running.
