Many people have heard of the website wordpress.com. This website allows you to sign in and create blogs, very easily and not requiring any additional...
Many people have heard of the website wordpress.com. This website allows you to sign in and create blogs,
very easily and not requiring any additional IT knowledge or techie know-how. And best of all, it’s completely free. So why then, would you ever need to sign up and pay for WordPress hosting?
The answer is the same as it is whenever you compare any kind of free web hosting with that of paid web hosting. And simply, it’s that you get what you pay for. If you want a blog that’s free of advertising, and that you can post to however often you want – without your blog crashing – then you need to find a good WordPress web host.
Because wordpress.com is a free service, they need to make their money somehow. And they do that by placing ads on the blogs running off their service. These ads can be small links, or they can be full banner ads placed at the top and bottom of your page. You won’t have any kind of control over these ads, and you also won’t make any additional revenue off of them. Instead, WordPress will. But not turning a profit off these ads actually isn’t even the biggest problem with them. That, you’ll quickly find, is that they can make a mess of your blog, and be unsightly to visitors. And if those visitors find them too distracting from the blog content, they may not return.
Another thing to remember when you sign up for free with wordpress.com is that you will be on a shared server; and there is no getting around it. With a shared server your blog will be located on the same server as many other blogs. Because of that, you will be severely limited in the amount of pictures and video files you can upload to your blog, because these are the biggest types of files and take up the most space on the server. Place too many on your site, and it could be shut down or not function properly.
With WordPress hosting on the other hand, you don’t have any of these problems. Your blog will be placed on a server, and that server will be any type of server that you choose. If shared hosting works for you, it can still be shared. If you need more space than what shared can offer, you can choose a VPS or a dedicated server for your WordPress blog. The power and control is given back to you and in many cases, only for a small cost.
No matter what kind of server you choose when you use WordPress hosting, you will never have any ads on your site that you don’t want to appear. Because you’re paying for a service, the web host is already recouping their costs from allowing you to use their servers and resources, so there’s no need for them to place ads on your website.
Wordpress.com can be a good option for beginners, or those that are only running very small personal blogs online. However, if you’re running a blog for any kind of business, or you want a large blog filled with all kinds of content, you’re going to need to sign up for WordPress web hosting. And you’ll be happy that you did!
