WordPress.com is now offering a pricing tier aimed at students that provides 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.
This is long overdue. For anyone teaching beginning web development, 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, and more. Hosting those projects has always been a roadblock, though.
Several alternatives have been tried over the years: shared hosting plans (which carry a financial cost), WPSandbox.io (now defunct, though alternatives exist), WordPress Playground (where saving and sharing work is complicated), sponsored hosting (a hard sell on a semester-by-semester basis), and others.
A student plan with a year-long window straight from the source is the ideal solution. WordPress.com may seem more point-and-click compared to a self-hosted WordPress.org site, but it offers all the same developer affordances for directly touching code these days.
It’s worth noting that the deal is only available for .blog and .art domains — not a deal-breaker for educational purposes. You can always point it to a custom domain down the road if needed.
