WordPress Blog: Free Blog, or Pay for Hosting/Your Own Domain Name?

There is a lot of information on the Internet about blogging, often claiming that WordPress is the best blogging platform. Usually the reasons they say this is because:

- WordPress gives you almost limitless options (in the form of features, widgets, and plugin applications),
- WordPress software has been improved and developed over time with users’ inputs taken into account,
- Because of WordPress’ long-standing status and search engine optimization, you will often get more organic traffic to your WordPress blog (I also have a Blogger blog, and in my experience, my WordPress blog gets a lot more visitors without any extra effort on my part).

All of these issues necessarily make WordPress a little more complicated to install and use, because there are so many things you need to get to grips with, even with the free version - but in my opinion, it’s worth it. I also feel that WordPress’ own support and how-to instructions are sometimes overly complicated, aimed more at intermediate/advanced bloggers and webmasters rather than ordinary people. But luckily, due to the popularity of WordPress, there is plenty of information about using WordPress all over the Internet.

So let’s look at the differences between FREE and PAID-FOR WordPress blogs.

With WordPress, there are three main options in terms of cost, hosting and domain name (and a few permutations inbetween). Often people are aware of only two of these options – the free version of WordPress blogs from WordPress.com, and the hosted blog with your own domain name from WordPress.org. Let’s now consider all three main options in more detail:

Option 1: Free WordPress blog

This means you go to www.wordpress.com, sign up, choose a blog name and start writing your blog – it’s that quick and easy. Your blog is completely free to ‘own’, use and edit (with lots of free features), but the downfall is that you don’t actually own it, WordPress does!

Your blog name will be quite cumbersome, because it will include wordpress.com in the domain name, for example http://AztecNetwork.wordpress.com. Because you haven’t paid anything and WordPress hosts and owns the blog, there are limitations on content – for example, no advertising is allowed; some content is restricted/disallowed, for example certain HTML coded items, such as banners or sign-up boxes/web-forms, Javascript and Flash; and no additional themes or plugins can be uploaded (although you have a reasonably large choice of free themes and widgets from WordPress.com). If you post something disallowed by WordPress (or illegal content), of course they have the right to simply shut you down!

This option isn’t recommended if you intend this to be your business blog, for two reasons – the longer domain name with wordpress.com in the name may seem unprofessional (and cheap, if they know it’s free), and you do not have all the rights, control and ownership of the content/blog that you would need for a business.

Option 2: Free WordPress blog with Upgrades

As with previous option, you still use a blog hosted and owned by WordPress.com. But you can purchase upgrades, such as additional storage space, CSS coding, video optimization, or for your blog to have your own domain name (they call this Redirecting/Domain Mapping).

You can either purchase a new domain name through WordPress and have your WordPress.com blog mapped to it for $14.97 per year; or use a domain name you already own for your WordPress.com blog which will cost $9.97 per year, payable to WordPress (prices correct at time of writing).

For the latter, you need to first buy your own domain name from a web domain company, such as JustHost.com (a domain name can cost anything from $5 to $15 once-off, or per year, depending on the domain name and the company). As your blog will still be hosted by WordPress.com – for free, you do NOT need to pay another web hosting company for the hosting (this will save you approximately $3 to $10 per month).

Remember that although your blog will appear to be more professional with its own domain name, for example, http://AztecInternetMarketing.com (and visitors won’t know if you’re with WordPress.com or WordPress.org), there are still WordPress restrictions and limitations on advertising and content, because WordPress.com still hosts and owns your blog!

Option 3: Your own WordPress blog

The last main option is one where you have full control, but it costs more – and this is the most obvious blogging option for businesses. As with option 2, you use your own domain name for your blog, but in this case, you need to have paid for the web hosting from a separate web hosting company. This is often referred to as a ‘self-hosted blog’, and you use www.Wordpress.org as your blogging platform, not WordPress.com (the dashboard and layout of these two platforms are not very different, except WordPress.org allows more freedom in uploading content).

Be sure to purchase your web hosting from a company that has easy WordPress installation and support (JustHost and a few others do – see WordPress.org’s web host recommendations). For this option, you essentially download the WordPress.org software for free, and use it as the blogging program for your self-hosted blog.

With this option, you will also have full control over advertising and content on your blog, because you own the domain name and blog, and pay for your own hosting. You will also have access to thousands if not millions of themes, add-ons and plugins for your blog, many for free, created by interested parties (an open source community).

What if you already have a free blog with content, and want to change over to your own domain?

This is possible, but depending on which WordPress option you choose, there will be some work to do, both on the WordPress side, as well as on the web host’s side.

For example, I had a free WordPress.com blog previously, which was already set up and included a number of posts I had written over the past few months – http://AztecNetwork.wordpress.com. As it is essentially a business blog, I decided that I needed to upgrade it to my own domain name and self-host it. Thus I purchased a new domain name, and installed the WordPress.org software via a very simple process through Fantastico (all described in easy step-by-step instructions by my web host, JustHost). But this meant I now simply had a WordPress.org blog, self-hosted and with my own domain name, but without any content in it – a blank canvas!

There are a number of steps/options for ‘moving’ an existing blog’s content to a new domain name:

• Simply export your blog’s posts, comments, tags, etc from WordPress.com (available in Tools in the Dashboard) to your computer as a file. Then simply import all that content to your newly self-hosted Wordpress.org blog. Depending on the theme/template you choose for your new self-hosted blog, you may need to do some editing of posts and pictures/media to ensure all fit in and are easy on the eye, but essentially most items will be there.
• The problem is that you will now have two blogs with the same content, and two separate web addresses/domains, when it would be more convenient for there to be just one (especially if you have already put web links on different sites with your older free blog’s address). In order to circumvent this, you will need to do Domain Mapping/Redirecting your blog through WordPress (at a cost), as mentioned in option 2 above, and below.

I would advise though that you decide on the self-hosted and own domain blog option from the start, before you’ve created any blog content. This is so that all your back links refer to your one blog address (your own domain name), and you won’t have the added complication of moving existing blog content over to a new domain. This is especially important if you intend to use your blog for business purposes.

Read more about some of these WordPress blog options from WordPress themselves:

• For more details about upgrades to WordPress.com, including using your own domain name, visit WordPress.com’s Domain Mapping page
• For more details about redirecting your WordPress.com blog to your own domain name, visit the Redirecting your Blog page at WordPress.com
• For more details on installing and using your self-hosted WordPress.org blog (with your own domain name), visit WordPress.org’s Quick Start Guide

WordPress logo courtesy of: http://tintation.com/2010/06/11/free-wordpress-logo-graphics-designs-colors/
Wordpress video courtesy of http://wordpress.tv/2009/01/05/signing-up-with-wordpresscom/
US dollar bill courtesy of http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~daphna/tom_homepage/09_dollar.html