Today we’re going to tackle the age old question: WordPress.com or WordPress.org? If you’re new to the world of WordPress, you’ll need some information in order to get started with your own blog or website. Here’s what we’ll be covering in this comparison post:
Differentiate between WordPress.org and WordPress.com
Compare Differences in:
Cost
Freedoms and Limitations
Maintenance and Development
How to decide between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
What is WordPress.org?
WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS. However, apart from powering many self-hosted WordPress websites, this CMS is also used as a hosted solution. Need a quick free blog? Yes, this is where hosted WordPress offerings come into play!
In this article, we shall be taking a look at four of the most popular hosted WordPress solution providers.
Talking of big fat things, I’ll start with a hefty disclaimer, I’m the founder and CEO of Edublogs – the largest education blog provider (and also based on WordPress) on the web.
So, having got that out of the way let me tell you why I’m profoundly unconcerned by the announcement today that WordPress.com is venturing into the ‘education vertical’ and why I don’t think it should scare of any other niche site builders out there.
tl;dr – it’s shallow, insincere, cynical, lacking in focus and flimsy.
Here’s why…
Almost too shallow for words
This column is being written while listening to The Traveling Wilburys, the Vol. 3 album, on vinyl. It is important that it is on vinyl, because had it not been I wouldn’t have been able to listen to it. Not because I’m an audiophile or vinyl snob (that’s a lie, I am), but rather because that’s the only music source connected to my home stereo. This is important to point out, since it is bound to annoy someone, and this is still a bloody column…
In my opinion, there is no contest between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress. I’ll take ownership of my site every day of the week, thank you very much.
But for all of its limitations, WordPress.com does offer up some pretty cool features. One such feature is a “milestone” widget, in which you can easily insert a rather elegantly styled countdown to an event.
But with a new plugin released today on the WordPress.org repository, you can now have your own milestone widget for your self-hosted blog.
Milestone
WordPress is free, open-source software used to build millions of websites of all varieties. There are tens of thousands of free plugins and themes in the WordPress repositories. WordPress is just PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript so any LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack can easily be used to host a WordPress site. You can even create WordPress sites on your local computer.
If you’re a photographer who also blogs and you’re on WordPress.com, look no farther than Mixfolio.
Mixfolio is yet another responsive theme — one of those trends that is also a Good Idea — meaning that regardless of the platform or device your content is viewed on, it will still look good, adjusting size and formatting to fit its point of consumption — and that includes images.
Equally impressive are:
A clean look with a judicious use of white space throughout the theme.
A tabbed presentation of metadata in Gallery view condensing information very nicely.
WordPress Recommends…
First, as a matter of due diligence, I feel I should direct you to what WordPress.org has to say about this topic. Here are the hosts that they most strongly recommend (and the minimum requirements that they set) for a WordPress.org site:
Dreamhost
Bluehost
Media Temple
Laughing Squid
If that is all the information that you need to make a decision, then you can stop reading right now.
But…
You might still want to take some time to think your way through the decision. Here are the questions I would recommend you ask of yourself and of any potential host.
How Much Do Your Really Need?
According to a recent article at AllThingsD, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Schneider revealed that the company anticipates revenues in the $45 million range this year.
How do they make that much? According to the AllThingsD article,
The majority of Automattic revenue comes from premium subscription services, and that’s supplemented by a “VIP” enterprise publisher business — in total, there are half a million paying customers — as well as a recently launched advertising revenue-sharing network.
In light of this growth, Automattic has hired, for the first time ever, a Chief Financial Officer and a General Councelor.
When I was first starting out with WordPress, I was rather confused by the fact that there seemed to be two versions. I had previously built websites from scratch with Notepad and a FTP client, so the world of content management systems was new to me. And before I had even started – before I even had a particularly good understanding of what WordPress actually was – I had to make a choice.
