The choice of your blogging platform is in most cases the fourth decision you make when starting up a new blog ( after the decision to start the blog, pick a concept for your blog, and think about your domain name). As you can see, i opted for Wordpress, even though other bloggers might opt for Blogger or others.
Wordpress has two different flavors and understanding the pros and cons of both is important as it will influence your daily blog operations as you move forward.
Wordpress.org
Wordpress.org is an open source (and thus a free) platform that provides you with tools required to set up a blog. In order to get started you’ll need to find an hosting service that will be compatible with Wordpress hosting. Wordpress.org has a list of preferred hosting services (but also companies not listed there can host your blog). I am hosting this blog with BlueHost, and to date their service was completely satisfactory, although i didn’t yet experience a spike that allowed me to stress-test their infrastructure (maybe you’ll help me with this 
).
The pros and cons of using Wordpress.org
Pros
1. You can select your own domain name.
2. You can leverage a huge amount of plugins that will add functionality to your site. See two examples here and here.
3. You can run Adsense,other advertising services, afiiliate links etc’ and thus monetize your blog
4. You have a myriad of blog themes to choose from.
Cons
1. Hosting and the domain name will cost you money (Hosting: normally up to $10/month for a new blog and Domain: up to 10$/year) .
2. You’ll need some technical knowledge to install the software and its plugins
3. You are responsible for backing up your blog
4. You are responsible for upgrading to new Wordpress.org versions
5. You might encounter a quality of service issue (your blog might even be unavailable) during spikes
Wordpress.com
Wordpress.com is a free-fully hosted blogging platform built on the Worpress.org software . Domain names of blogs hosted by Wordpress.com will always have the suffix “*.wordpress.com”. Here you don’t need to find an hosting service, nor to setup the Wordpress software on your own.
The pros and cons of using Wordpress.com
Pros
1. It’s free
2. They take care of blog setup, backup, security and upgrades, so you don’t need any technical knowledge.
Cons
1. They won’t let you monetize your blog.
2. You don’t have many themes to choose from for your blog
3. Your blog url contains the *.wordpress.com suffix.
In summary, if you want to create a blog with no intention to monetize it, and you don’t care about the suffix thing, go for Wordpress.com, in all other cases, go for Wordpress.org.
[tags] Wordpress.org, Wordpress, Wordpress.com, Compare Wordpress.org with Wordpress.com[/tags]
Feel free to look into these related tips:
- Revive some of your good posts :)
- How to add an address bar icon (favicon) to your Wordpress.org blog?
Posted by Gili
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Informative post. I was with blue host for awhile, but was not 100 % satisfied.
Comparison of Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com…
Thinking of moving to Wordpress? Look into this article in order to determine what you platform of choice should be….
Very informative post! Great reviews and well presented too.
Informative post…..I had compared free wordpress with blogger some time back. Now I too have shifted to hosted wordpress…
one of my friends asked me about this… I have forwarded them here
Nice post…
Excellent post. This is one of those post that tend to get referenced to because of the level of information provided. Great quality and great explanation of the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. Nice work!
Nice post! We both know I really needed this. Thanks Gili.
I would always opt for the self install model, simply because it helps me to learn. Simply letting them do all the work means, you will never know the intricacies once you are on your own..
If you don’t want to monetize your blog go fro wordpress.com, because you don’t have to handle any headaches related to managing a web script
Info really helped me.. i was looking hard for the same some days back and couldnt find coz this article was down in search rank… too bad google dont index good articles like this
Thanks for informative post!