WordPress Self Hosted vs WordPress.com Hosted Blog Pros Cons :: Review

I know many people will be reading this thinking about if they should switch between a WordPress.com site to a WordPress.org (self-hosted) site, not the other way around. It’s been about a week since I made the switch over from being a self hosted blog (almost 10 years on the WordPress.org codex) to now being a WordPress.com hosted blog, and the move, hopefully the last one I ever make in the hosting realm) has been great.

I had always sorta scoffed at the non-self-hosted WordPress blogs. After all, those were just blogs who couldn’t or didn’t know how to self-host, right? Well, my Rule #29 says I have had a change of heart. I am amazed, to say the least, at the difference between the two options, and while each has their own advantages and disadvantages, WordPress.com has built an enormous community of bloggers based on their hosted platform that a self-hosted blog is completely removed from. This is just the nature of self-hosting, you are on your own, you have full control over all the code, can make any change you want to the php files and so on, but you do give up an incredible community of bloggers.

Below is a list of the fifteen best and worst things about the hosting differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org in no specific order. Which one is best for you would be the one that has fewer cons I would think, but I used a self-hosted (GoDaddy.com) blog for almost 10 years until I found the cons outweighed the pros of letting WordPress.com host my site. After one week on WordPress.com I am thrilled. So if you are trying to decide between a WordPress hosted blog or a self-hosted install of WordPress.org Codex, read through the list below first. Any question feel free to ask in the comment, not a problem.

Pros of Worpress.com and Cons of Self-Hosted Blog

1. Price, free (this depends on if you pay for custom design, domain, and no ads, which I did, then it’s a wash $90/year)
2. You do not have to handle any heavy coding
3. Participation in and traffic from the WordPress.com community like, blogs of the day, tags, their reader
4. Possibility to get Freshly Pressed (Five Ways to Get Featured on Freshly Pressed) (happened here on October 2012 with this post)
5. No SQL Database and tables to backup or mess with
6. You will not get hacked, or you greatly lessen to possibility of getting hacked
7. You will not lose your data, it won’t get corrupted, deleted, or all around messed up
8. The UI (user interface) or dashboard is slightly better than .org version
9. You do not have bandwidth limitations, sky is the limit if your blog gets hammered
10. You don’t have to handle the upgrades to the WordPress.com platform (that is often a pain)
11. Never any down time (even though GoDaddy says they never go down, “connection to database” comes up)
12. Extremely fast server response times in loading the site and saving new posts
13. You don’t have to deal with GoDaddy.com (exception see #8 below)
14. Custom domain mapping available (this is a must for me, if this wasn’t here, I’m out)
15. Customization of the CSS code (this one was also a huge deciding factor for me, but #14 and #15 are not free)

Cons of Worpress.com and Pros of Self-Hosted Blog

1. You do not get as much control over your own site
2. Only customization you can do is in the style.css file (that wasn’t as bad as I thought either)
3. No control over the code, can’t customize php files
4. No control over the robots.txt file (can’t set/change crawl rates)
5. Seems to be harder to get Google to index your site (verdict is still out on this one)
6. Can’t use plugins (I thought this would be a bigger deal than it is)
7. Can’t upload a custom theme, only options are theme WordPress.com makes available to you
8. You will still need a domain to host files if you want off-wordpress.com file storage
9. Price, could possibly be cheaper than the “free” WordPress.com hosted if you only pay for Godaddy.com $5/mth host
10. WordPress.com hosted pushes ads on your site unless you pay $30/year to take them off (this stinks)
11. No ability to host your own advertising on the site from third party vendors
12. You don’t have any type of FTP access to your files, can’t download the wp-content/uploads directory (this also stinks)
13. Self-hosted is complete and total control over all php files, do as you like
14. Self-hosted is a great learning tool for customizing php code, themes, design, etc
15. Self-hosted you own everything that has to do with the content, the files are your files