Wordpress blogging open source software
I was just asked by a friend of mine whether I paid $10 on wordpress.com to have my blog redirected to my domain name pranavbhat.info or did I pay for a domain and then downloaded wordpress from Wordpress.org and then purchased another $10 for website hosting? So, I thought this is a good time to write the reasons why i decided to download wordpress and decided to buy a web hosting package.

  1. Freedom to make changes as you want: With wordpress.com blog where in you get a “yourname.wordpress.com” blog you cannot make changes as you would have wished to. There are hundereds and hundreds of plug ins developed for Wordpress and even more, maybe thousands of themes developed for the wordpress platform. You can use these themes the way you want on a wordpress.org blog which you cant do on wordpress.com blog( Contradict me if i am wrong here but as far as i know i am not)
  2. Have additional features that supplement your blog: Suppose your own a technology blog and you have a pretty good user base and a good user interaction. To enable more interaction with the users and to enhance your community you would need a forum or a message board. So, what if you want to have a forum software like PHPBB or SMB or even wordpress produced BBPress. You can do this on a self hosted blog i.e a wordpress.org blog but not on a wordpress.com blog.
  3. Email Accounts: Suppose you wanted to have an email address like yourname@yourblogname.com. This is easily possible when you buy a web hosting package but relative difficult when you have a wordpress.com hosted blog. Ofcourse you can do this by buying a seperate email package and then change your MX entries at your domain registrar account. But, that would be a repetitive process. You can also have the domain registrar redirect emails sent at anything@yourblogname.com to your free email address like anything@gmail.com. So, email accounts isnt really a problem but email accounts like yourname@yourblogname.com definitely adds more professionalism and creditability. Email accounts are absolutely essential when you own a business blog.
  4. Advertisements: Blogs are these days a great way to make money although it isn’t easy; but people do make money from blogs mainly in the form of advertisements and the major source of advertisements is Google Adsense. In wordpress.com hosted blog although you can promote products using affiliate links you cannot have Google Adsense on your blog. That is possible in a self hosted wordpress blog as you can see in my blog.

Having said all the above points, wordpress.com does have certain advantages above wordpress.org. Some of them are:

  1. Automatic Updates: As soon as there is a new version of the wordpress platform, the wordpress.com automatically updates itself so that you dont have to manually update it. In a self hosted wordpress blog , you will usually have to update and install the blog by yourself. However, these days most web hosting packages do provide automatic installation, updation and uninstallation from their control panel usually under the fantiasco suite.
  2. Better community features: Wordpress.com usually helps in building a better community as compared to a self hosted blog but if you are social networking expert or good at it then it should not be a problem even on self hosted blogs.
  3. One username many blogs: On a wordpress.com blog you just need a single username to create as many blogs as you want. On wordpress.org you need to have a separate installation for each blog. Although this is resolved by the use of Wordpress Mu which is a multi blogging system on which wordpress.com is based.

So, as you can see there are several advantages for self hosted wordpress blogs and a couple of them for wordpress.com blogs. However, for me the advantages of a self hosted wordpress blog are far greater than those of a wordpress.com blog and hence i have chosen a self hosted wordpress blog as my personal cum professional blog.

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