Are WordPress.com Premium Features Worth It?
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.
Would you have any suggestions specifically for more efficient web hosting?
Comment by Camille — February 19, 2010 @ 3:02 pm
There are tons and tons of viable web hosts out there but my two favorites are HostGator and DreamHost. HostGator is probably the best if you’re new to the web hosting side of things and DreamHost is more for power users instead of beginners.
Comment by Jack — February 20, 2010 @ 9:35 pm
While I can see your perspective about the premium services not seeming to provide enough value when you could do it yourself for less money, I think there’s also an argument to be made that time is saved by using WordPress.com over the installed version. For one, with a self-installed version, you have to upgrade to new versions of WordPress yourself. With WordPress.com, the upgrades happen automatically and are guaranteed to work with the widgets available to that system. This alone saves a significant amount of time over the long haul, so I consider WordPress.com a very viable solution for many smaller sites. I’m a web designer, and I’m beginning to use it for some of my freelance projects. Time is money too, so I’m willing to pay a little to save time on my end.
Comment by Steve Hong — February 26, 2010 @ 2:27 pm
Fair argument, Steve, but the self-hosted WordPress can be upgraded inside the admin now with a click of a button. It literally takes seconds to do.
Comment by Jack — February 26, 2010 @ 2:35 pm
I just found this post via a search; I’m looking into blog hosting options as I’m thinking of starting my own blog. I actually own domains and webhost a couple of ordinary websites on cheapo shared hosting; one of them includes a wordpress blog in its members area (so the traffic to it is low). So I don’t mind setting up wordpress etc on a site of my own.
But I’ve read that the heavy server load that blogs (being server generated content) put on the servers can lead to problems on your standard cheap shared hosting e.g. at DreamHost. I hate slow sites; slow sites lose traffic. It’s an argument for using a service designed for bloggers such as wordpress. Obviously if I only get two or three readers a day it’s not going to matter, but if that’s the case it’s not worth doing. I’m hoping to build a decent sized readership (and what blogger doesn’t want to do that?
I don’t want to splash out the money for dedicated server hosting. Will a blog with a significant readership run okay on shared hosting. Any thoughts?
Comment by Ian B — February 28, 2010 @ 11:43 am
I don’t think you’ll have much worries Ian until you hit insanely high traffic levels and by that point you’ll be glad to have such a problem anyway. There’s a WordPress plugin called WP Super Cache specifically for this problem though.
Comment by Jack — February 28, 2010 @ 11:48 am
Jack, thanks for the reply! I’ll look into that plugin and consider my options…
Comment by Ian B — February 28, 2010 @ 11:51 am