WordPress is one of the most widely used Blogging platform. It’s an open source CMS which is powered by PHP and MySQL. According to recent surveys, almost 16.7% of websites on Internet is powered by WordPress. Like BlogSpot which is powered by Google, WordPress is powered by it’s parent company Automattic which offers two variation of this popular blogging platform; WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We are not going to differentiate between free and self hosted WP blog at this moment, but we will quickly learn about What is WordPress and about two variations of WordPress here.
WordPress.org vs WordPress.com
WordPress was launched as a Blogging platform but now it’s fully evolved into a content management system. That means, you can use it to run fully-functional business Websites. There are many E-commerce, Membership websites are running on WordPress. WordPress team also offers buddypress plugin, which convert WordPress into Social networking site. We will talk about it in coming days. For now, WordPress has two variants and most of newbie get confused between which form of WordPress they should opt for.
WordPress.com Blogs A.k.a free WordPress domain blogs:
WordPress offers free WordPress blog which can give you address like anyname.WordPress.com. You also have an option to add custom domain to your blog, which is managed by WordPress and gives you limited access to settings. Like you can’t install every WordPress theme you wanted but you have choice to install Free themes from WordPress theme directory or some selected premium WordPress theme. This platform is good for non serious or hobby bloggers. Anyone on the Internet can go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free account and get a WordPress.com blog instantly.
Self Hosted WordPress blog A.K.A. WordPress.org blogs:
Self hosted blog, as the name suggest, needs to be installed on your server. You download WordPress software from WordPress.org and install it on your server. Usually you buy a shared hosting and install WordPress on it. You have complete control over settings and customization and you are not limited to anything. Though self hosted blog requires investment in terms of custom domain name and hosing space. This is more popular as you have power to monetize your blog and have complete control over everything.
Some more info about WordPress:
WordPress was first introduced in 2003, founded by Matt Mullenweg, who is also the founder of WordPress parent company AutoMattic. Automattic also offers other services like:
- VaultPress- which ensure WordPress backup and security.
- Aksimet plugin - which catches the spam comments.
- Jetpack plugin- Which brings many features of WordPress.com into self hosted WordPress blog including WordPress stats.
WordPress has given a complete new dimension to online business and many 3rd party services and tools are available in the market, whose models completely run on WordPress. I hope this article has given you a basic understanding of What is WordPress and their variants. Now, we will quickly look at WordPress Architecture. You can also check out below guides to get started with WordPress:
- How to Install WordPress
- How to set up WordPress for the first time
- Must have WordPress plugins for new Blog
WordPress Architecture:
Here is an Image showing WordPress Architecture.
Soon we will be writing more on difference between free and self hosted versions and many How to tips for WordPress. Don’t forget to join us on Twitter @wpfreesetup and Facebook for latest updates.
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1 Comment
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Hi Harsh,
Thanks for providing valuable information via your blog. i have currently hosting my blog on blogger and have tried a number of times to migrate the same on wordpress by setting up wordpress on local machine. Everytime, the blog gets imported but it looses its formatting in the process. The pictures gets misplaced, fonts are not consistent and the text gets left aligned. Since I have around 200+ posts, hence doing it manually will required lot of time and efforts.
Please help me out.