WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

  • Unknown's avatar
    sherwoodhiggins · Member ·

    Hi there,
    I’d like to create a small-scale, private blog. Its purpose will be to record our growing family with pictures, videos and stories. The intention is to share it with close family and friends, but not the general public. And we’d like to add pictures and video for years to come. I’m not sure what will be most cost-effective in the long run– to buy web hosting and use wordpress.org (what are the fees for wordpress.org if I have a private blog like I described?) or use wordpress.com (the premium option seems expensive! Can I use something less expensive and still upload audio and video?).
    Thank you!

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Either option will work for what you want to do. Two things to consider:

    On WordPress.com you’ll need the Premium Plan to have the ability to upload videos, but should you ever let your Premium Plan expire, your site itself and any content you’ve already added will still exist. You’ll just lose the ability to add any new videos until you buy Premium again. (This of course applies to the other features included in the plan as well.)

    You might very well be able to get hosting for less than $99 a year somewhere else, but
    with self-hosting the moment you stop paying for hosting your site will be gone, as in your host will delete it from their servers and there will be no way to recover it if you did not make your own backups. Automatic backups on self-hosted sites are usually a premium service with most hosts and can push up your hosting fee significantly. On WordPress.com we provide that for free.

    Another consideration is privacy. On a self-hosted site you can install a plugin to make it private and invite the people you want to have access by creating a unique login for each one on the specific site.

    On WordPress.com you can also set a site to private, but the people you invite will need to create their own WordPress.com accounts in order to accept the invitations, which is a bit more complicated and might be difficult for elderly relatives.

    Overall if you want simple, I’d recommend WordPress.com (and not just because I work here :)

    Let me know if you have any more questions about this.

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