WordPress.com offers a lot of features to their users at a small price each year. You can get extra storage, CSS options and ad removal each with their own fee. The question I have to ask is are these features, all added together, worth the price? Or would someone looking to expand their blog with more customization be better off finding their own web hosting package and using the open source WordPress.org software to run their blog?

Here’s a breakdown of the WordPress.com premium features:

Your Own Domain – You can have your WordPress.com blog run by their service but using your own domain for $10/year. That’s the same fee for that same price by yourself or you can use WordPress.com’s domain register for an extra $15/year.

Extra Storage – All WordPress.com accounts come with 3GB of storage but you can expand that storage in blocks of 5GB. So for an extra 5G you’d pay $20/year, 15GB for $50/year and 25GB for $90/year. Any web host worth their weight can offer you similar space options for equal or lower prices.

Custom CSS – You can gain the ability to customize your own CSS on your blog for $15/year. With WordPress.org this is obviously free.

Go Ad-Free – For $30/year, WordPress.com will stop running their ads on your blog. Let’s think about this for a second. A small blog probably doesn’t even generate $30/year in revenue for WordPress.com when the ads run normally. This is a huge win for WordPress.com in most cases.

Final Verdict

If you host a blog on WordPress.com and are considering upgrading to any of these premium features I strongly, strongly suggest you think twice. For much less money you can find quality web hosting that will give you even more benefits than what WordPress.com can offer you.