What is WordPress.com?
WordPress.com is a fully-featured hosted solution, which takes care of all hosting-related matters for its users. To begin creating a WordPress website, you just create an account. You’re limited with the themes you can use and you have no access to plugins. However, the platform has a lot of restrictions and is more expensive in the long run.
What is WordPress.org?
WordPress.org is a self-hosted content management system (CMS), which means you’ll have to download and install the software onto your computer and find your own hosting provider. The majority of WordPress users opt for this method because it is the most cost-effective and free to set up a website.
| WordPress.com | WordPress.com Business & eCommerce | WordPress.org |
| Premium hosting and security are included. | Your custom domain, premium hosting, security, and backups are included. | Your custom domain, premium hosting, security, and backups are included. |
| Choose from a large collection of beautiful themes. | Choose and customize any of beautiful theme or install your own custom theme. | Install custom themes. Build your own with PHP and CSS. |
| Add sharing button and manually share your content to social networks. | Integrate your site with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networks. | Install a plugin like Jetpack, to enable sharing functionality on your site. |
| Popular features like stats, comments, and polls are included. There’s no need to install plugins. | Install plugins to extend your site’s capabilities (e.g. to create an online store). | Install plugins to extend your site’s functionality. |
| WordPress.com forums are always available for support. | Premium support via live chat and email. | No dedicated support. Visit the WordPress.org support forums for assistance. |
| You must register for an account on WordPress.com. | You must register for an account on WordPress.com. | No registration with WordPress.org is required. |
The cost of using WordPress.com v.s. WordPress.org
WordPress.com does allow you to set up a website entirely for free, but there are some big downsides to the free plan at WordPress.com:
- You can only place your site under a subdomain
- You cannot remove WordPress.com’s own ads and branding from your site (probably the biggest downside of a free version)
- You get limited disk space of 3GB (so, it’s best to do some backups and prepare storage space elsewhere)
- You can’t install plugins or any free themes or premium themes that aren’t available on the platform by default
If you do want to use your website for e-commerce, you will have to pay at least $45/month (about RM202+++) on your WordPress.com plan. All in all, this means that running a website on WordPress.com will cost you at least $540 per year (about RM2,424+++).
With WordPress.org, you have full control of your website. You can change it to meet your needs and do whatever you want with it.
To make that happen, you first need to pick a web host. We recommend you use iCore, it is a Malaysian hosting provider. Here’s what’s good about iCore’s offering:
- WordPress.org costs less than wordpress.com in a year
- You get a free domain name for the first year
- WordPress installation comes for free
- You’re free to install any tools you like and control the overall website functionality
This is the best choice if you want to be completely on your own with some added help from your favourite WordPress hosting platform.
JNDesign uses WordPress.org for web development and selected iCore Technology Sdn Bhd as the hosting and domain provider. You don’t know how to build a website, that’s okay. You can start your website for one price, contact us for more information!
