There are two ways you can create a blog powered by WordPress — 1. WordPress.com a free, WordPress hosted, more limited installation, or; 2. WordPress.org a self hosted, more complicated, and more powerful installation. Both of them have their pros and cons and WordPress support oulines the difference as follows:
WordPress.com Benefits
- It’s free and much easier to setup
- Everything is taken care of: setup, upgrades, spam, backups, security, etc
- Your blog is on hundreds of servers, so it’s highly unlikely it will go down due to traffic
- Your posts are backed up automatically
- You get extra traffic from blogs of the day and tags
- You can find like-minded bloggers using tag and friend surfer
- Your login is secure (SSL) so no one can get into your account if you use wifi
WordPress.com Cons
- We provide 70+ themes (and adding more every day) which you can modify and edit the CSS, but you cannot run a custom theme*
- You can’t hack the PHP code behind your blog*
- You can’t upload plugins
WordPress.org Benefits
- Ability to upload themes
- Ability to upload plugins
- Great community
- Complete control to change code if you’re technically minded
WordPress.org Cons
- You need a good web host, which generally costs $7-12 a month, or thousands of dollars per month for a high traffic site
- Requires more technical knowledge to set up and run
- You’re responsible for stopping spam
- You have to handle backups
- You must upgrade the software manually when a new version comes out
- If you get a huge spike in traffic (like Digg or Slashdot) your site will probably go down unless you have a robust hosting setup
Why do I share all of this with you, you ask???
Well, I have hosted several sites on WordPress.com and one of my favorite features is that almost the second you publish a posting, search engines like Google and Yahoo index your post. Naturally, when I decided to switch josh.net from a Joomla powerd site to WordPress.org powered site I assumed that this great feature would follow. Wrong!
I began creating new entries in josh.net and it was taking DAYS for Google to index them. I checked robots.txt and nothing was procluding the search engines from indexing or crawling my pages. I checked my .htaccess. I check the update services feature of WordPress.org and my site was sending update through Ping-O-Matic. For the life of me, I could not figure out what was wrong.
Right about the time I was going to give up, I came across Joseph Scott’s blog and information on a plugin RSSCloud that he created for the self hosted WordPress.org sites. It turns out that this plugin is automatically installed and activated on all WordPress.com sites, but if you are running your own WordPress.org installation you need to install this yourself. If you are looking for more technical information I encourage you to check out Joseph’s blog.