Many MarsEdit customers choose to host their blogs with WordPress. Because WordPress is open-source software, there are many ways to run it on a server, ranging from the eponymous WordPress.com hosting service, to other commercial hosts, to installing the software yourself on a shared or dedicated hosting service.

Fully Hosted Solutions

Fully hosted solutions take all the maintenance and configuration headache out of setting up your blog. Googling for WordPress hosting should reveal a huge number of services willing to provide WordPress hosting for free, or for a small monthly fee. Here are some of the services that are most commonly recommended among WordPress users.

• WordPress.com
• WP Engine
• DreamPress
• Bluehost

Self Hosted Solutions

If you decide to install WordPress yourself, be aware that web hosting providers vary in their treatment of the kinds of network activity that apps like MarsEdit impose on a server. The number and size of requests that are made by MarsEdit are not outlandish, but because they are numerous and often made in rapid succession while updating your blog, they can be flagged by some servers as potential attacks on the server. You might want to ask the hosting service you are considering what their policy is about whitelisting access to WordPress’s “xmlrpc.php” API endpoint before settling on a provider.

Shared Hosting

Installing WordPress in a shared hosting environment is a good compromise, because the hosting service will typically take responsibility for updating the server operating system, applying security patches, etc. The only thing you need to worry about is keeping WordPress itself up to date, which is easier than ever because it supports automatic updates.

Here are some popular shared hosting services that support installing WordPress within your own site:

• DreamHost
• Pair

Dedicated Hosting

Installing WordPress on your own dedicated server or VPS may be an attractive option, particularly if you already have experience managing web sites. If you run your own server, you may need to pay attention to any firewall or security plugins you install, to ensure that they don’t interfere with MarsEdit’s communication to your blog.

Here are some popular dedicated hosting solutions that can be used to set up general-purpose web hosts, on which you can then install and configure WordPress:

• Linode
• Digital Ocean
• DreamHost

Cloud Hosting

Google and Amazon offer pre-configured virtual machines suitable for hosting WordPress on Google Cloud and Amazon EC2, respectively:

• Google Cloud
• Amazon EC2