GridPane - Now You Can Use It For Free

Yesterday GridPane announced that they have introduced a free plan - it's called the Core Plan. This is great news if you want to use their software services but you can't quite afford the subscriptions.

What Is GridPane?

GridPane is a hosting service for WordPress sites, except that they do not provide any servers. They provide the dashboard for you to manage extremely low cost spin up servers (VPS - virtual private servers) of the type you will find at for example, Digital Ocean or Vultr or even Lightsail.

These servers are extremely low cost - you can get one for as little as $6 per month or $10 per month. Now you can add GridPane to that for free, for up to 25 sites. You can therefore benefit from a world class hosting solution without having to set up and run a bare metal server.

But What About Support?

However, there has to be a downside. GridPane will not offer any support on the free plan. Support is of course the expensive side of the equation. So on the free, Core GridPane plan, you'll have to figure out most things for yourself. But they do provide lots of written, detailed documentation.

The process of getting started, spinning up a new server, and deploying your first site, takes less than 15 minutes. And we have step by step instructions for the literal handful of actions that you have to take in order to pull all this magic off.

Patrick Gallagher - GridPane

I have had a paid GridPane account for three years and have only needed support three times in three years. So I figure you'll manage just fine. This is your opportunity to learn about running a blazing fast server using GridPane's incredible dashboard. Go for it. You literally have nothing to lose.

Once you have found your feet and you've generated some income, then you can move up to a supported level of GridPane... if you want to!