So happy to see WordPress.com offering a pricing tier aimed at students that gives them free hosting for a year:
WordPress.com offers the Student plan free, so cost is never a barrier to learning web skills. The goal is for students of any subject to create and share their thoughts and work online, and to own their online presence from the start.
I also think it’s way overdue. As someone who teaches beginning web development, I find that building a WordPress site makes for a great final project to demonstrate the myriad skills covered over the course of a semester — HTML, CSS, design, hosting, etc. Hosting those projects has always been a roadblock though.
I’ve tried several othered things over the years: Shared hosting plans (which sets me back financially), WPSandox.io (gone bye-bye though there are alternatives), WordPress Playground (saving and sharing work is complicated), sponsored hosting (it’s a hard sell on a semester-by-semester basis), and on and on.
A student plan with a year-long leash straight from the source is the perfect solution. You might think that WordPress.com is too point-and-click compared to a self-hosted WordPress.org site, but dot-com offers all the same developer affordances for directly touching code these days.
