What’s the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org?

Wordpress.com is a free blog platform, hosted by WordPress. You can have a totally free blog as a subdomain on their server. Your blog’s URL would be xxxxxx.wordpress.com where xxxxxx is your chosen username. The advantage is that it’s free and you have a wide choice of themes (designs) and blogging tools that you can choose from. The disadvantage is that you can’t monetize it: they don’t allow you to put Adsense on it and they can close you down if you have money-making or business links on your blog. And another downside is that you don’t own the blog - they do. They can remove your blog at will if you do something that is against their terms of service.

WordPress.org is the self-hosted version of WordPress. The software driving the blog is free but you have to pay for a domain and hosting service. This doesn’t cost megabucks and is essential if you are running any sort of business. The advantage of this is that the blog URL is your own domain that you registered. And you can pretty much do what you like on your blog: have Adsense, sell your own product(s), have affiliate links, plugins, banners, whatever you like. You own the blog - it’s your property and you could even sell it.

Tags: wordpress.com, wordpress.org

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.