WORDPRESS
Wordpress (.com) Hosting –v- Self-Hosting
When you use Wordpress as your blogging platform you have the choice of hosting your blog at Wordpress.com or of finding your own hosting company. Wordpress.com offers free blog hosting accounts (a lot of people don’t know that Wordpress.com can also host “normal” web sites as well as blogs) but there are limitations:
- your domain name will be somethingyouchoosethatisavailable.wordpress.com. You won’t get away from the “.wordpress.com” bit;
- you don’t get email so will need to get an email account elsewhere. There are lots of free email accounts available from places like outlook.com, google and yahoo but these come with their own disadvantages which I’ll write about separately. The best you will get from Wordpress.com is a limited number of email “forwarders”. So you could create an email address along the lines of somethingyouchoosethatisavailable@wordpress.com and set it up so that any email that is sent to that address will be sent on to yourrealemailaddress@whereveritis. You won’t be able to SEND email from your Wordpress.com email address;
- you have to accept that advertisements (over which you have little control) may appear on your blog – the advertising revenue pays for your free blog account! Consider that you may be, say, a Roman Catholic. How would you react to advertisements for birth control products appearing on your blog? Or you’re in America, a Democrat, and find advertisements for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign?
You may want to have a more appropriate domain name (I have rivendell.wales among others) without the “.wordpress.com” at the end. You may want to be able to use your domain to both send and receive email. You may want to access a range of features that you cannot use with Wordpress.com hosting.
You may step up to a paid Wordpress.com account, a sort of halfway house between Wordpress and self-hosting but you still don’t get email and whilst you can then choose (at cost) your own domain name and stop adverts, there are still other issues which may limit what you can do.
This is why many people choose their own hosting company. This is called “self-hosting”. You choose a company, pay their fee and away you go. You will also need to choose and purchase (and renew annually) your chosen domain name. Choosing your hosting company and domain name are topics I’ll cover separately. For the moment, I’m just looking at the underlying difference between Wordpress hosting and self-hosting.
The first mistake people make is to say they’ve moved from .com to .org (there are, I suppose, two parts to Wordpress: Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org). But you don’t leave one and you don’t move to the other. They’re totally different entities.
- Wordpress.com is all about hosting. It’s essentially just like a hosting company that you might choose to use to self-host your blog or web site. Deciding whether to stick with Wordpress.com or shift to another hosting company is simply a choice of what’s on offer.
- Wordpress.org is an online resource, no more, no less. And it’s (mostly) free! From Wordpress.org you can download the same Wordpress programs (if your hosting company doesn’t already offer them), the same themes (and if you purchase a premium theme and download it, it’s yours and you can move it around to different hosting companies in the future), all the same information and, finally, a lot more plugins than you will find on Wordpress.com.
But you haven’t completely left Wordpress.com you know! When you log in to manage your blog, look at the login dialogue. It’ll mention Wordpress.com. If you install the Jetpack plugin it’ll ask you to link to your Wordpress.com account (same id and password as when you hosted your blog there). Wordpress.com will deliver in-blog statistics; manage your subscribers (and your own subscriptions to other Wordpress blogs) and a lot more. Wordpress.com will deliver the updates to your Wordpress installation, your themes and plugins.
If you use Wordpress you’re part of the community. You’re a member of Wordpress.com and can download anything available at Wordpress.org.
Welcome to a much more friendly and beneficial Hotel California.
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