WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

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  madeleine95 · Member · Sep 15, 2009 at 2:13 am

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  Which would you recommend? How would you measure the difference in ease? Thanks!

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · Sep 15, 2009 at 3:07 am

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  Blogging with the two is very similar, but there are major differences to consider.

  With a blog here, you do not have to worry about upgrades or troubleshooting or backups, or installing software, and wordpress.COM is very secure. With that peace of mind you can blog and not worry about things, but of course there are restrictions. You cannot use javascript or flash here, you cannot use plugins, you cannot upload themes found on the internet, and you are limited on the amount of customization you can do.

  With a wordpress.ORG blog on a third-party hosting site, you are first off looking at spending an average of $10 to $25 per month (combined cost) for a domain name and hosting depending on your storage and bandwidth requirements. Next, you have to install and configure the wordpress software. Although the software will typically run right out of the box after the installation on most web hosts, there may be some additional configuration files you will have to create.

  With a .ORG blog, you are responsible for all troubleshooting, all upgrades, all backups and such. If you don’t do regular backups and the web host server crashes and they do not have any backups, you can lose a bunch of work.

  With a .ORG blog, you have the freedom to install virtually any javascript, flash, plugins, themes, etc. that you want, but that freedom comes at a price. There is a lot of very badly written code out there and some of it can open security holes that can be used to hack your blog. Some of that bad code is done on purpose. There are also some themes out there that have malware injected into them and when you load the theme, your site is infected. Web hosts take a very dim view of that and scan for it all the time, and will shut your account down in less than a heartbeat. In some cases they may not let you have it back either – especially if the bad code in your account brings down one of their servers and all the other users on that server.