Two products, one name

The single most confusing thing about WordPress is that the name refers to two different products — and the difference determines what your site can do, what it costs, and who ultimately controls it.

WordPress the software is free and open source. Anyone can download it from wordpress.org and run it on any hosting they like. When people say “self-hosted WordPress”, they mean this: the software, on hosting you choose.

WordPress.com is a commercial hosting platform run by Automattic that operates that software for you. You sign up, they handle servers, updates and backups, and in exchange the free and cheaper tiers restrict what you can install and change.

Neither is a scam and neither is wrong. But they sit at opposite ends of the control spectrum, and choosing between them without realising there is a choice is how people end up two years into a site that cannot do the thing they now need.

What WordPress.com gives you

Genuine convenience. There is no installation, no PHP version to think about, no updates to run — the platform is patched, backed up and scaled by people whose whole job that is. For someone who wants to write and never think about servers, that is a real and honest offer.

The structure of the tiers is where you need to read carefully. The free tier puts your site on a wordpress.com subdomain and shows the platform's advertising on your pages. Paid personal tiers remove ads and connect your own domain. But the abilities most people eventually want — installing plugins of your choosing, uploading a theme, running your own advertising — have historically been reserved for the more expensive business-level tiers, at a monthly price several times what equivalent self-hosted hosting costs.

That is the model in a sentence: the software is free, and you pay progressively to unlock the freedoms the software already had.

What self-hosted WordPress gives you

Everything, immediately. The full plugin directory — tens of thousands of them — any theme from anywhere, direct file access, your own analytics, your own advertising, WooCommerce with no platform commission, and a database you can export in full whenever you like.

The trade is responsibility. Updates to core, themes and plugins are yours to apply (or to automate — WordPress has done automatic background updates for years, and one-click installers such as Softaculous can update everything on a schedule). Backups are yours to arrange. If a plugin misbehaves, you are the one who deactivates it.

In practice the workload is smaller than the word “self-hosted” suggests. Installation is a one-click job taking under five minutes on any host with Softaculous, and the routine maintenance of a small site amounts to a few minutes a month. It is not nothing, but it is not system administration either.

The cost comparison, honestly

Self-hosted looks cheaper and usually is, but compare like with like.

Self-hosted: a domain (roughly £8–£12 a year for a .co.uk) plus shared hosting, which runs from about £1 to £10 a month depending on the host and what is included. Everything the software can do is available at every price point — the hosting tier changes your resources, not your permissions.

WordPress.com: free if you accept the subdomain and adverts; a few pounds a month for a personal tier with your own domain; substantially more per month for the tier that permits arbitrary plugins and themes. If your endpoint is “full WordPress”, the platform route typically costs several times the self-hosted route for the same capability.

Where WordPress.com genuinely earns its price is the operations you never do: no updates, no backup discipline, no security thinking. Whether that is worth the difference depends entirely on whether you would rather spend money or fifteen minutes a month.

Ownership and portability

This is the difference that matters most in year three rather than week one.

A self-hosted site is a folder of files and a database. You can copy it, move it to any host on earth, hand it to a developer, or restore it onto a laptop. The entire migration process is mechanical and well-trodden, and no company's permission is involved.

A WordPress.com site exports its content cleanly — posts, pages, media — and credit to the platform, the export tools are good. But the site itself, its theme configuration and platform-specific features, do not transfer as a running whole. Leaving means rebuilding the container around your content. People do it successfully every day; it is simply work that the self-hosted route never creates.

And on the free tier, the address itself — yoursite.wordpress.com — belongs to the platform. Every link earned there stays there. If you take one thing from this article: whichever route you choose, connect a domain you own from the start.

Which one for which project

Choose WordPress.com if you want to publish writing with zero operational involvement, you are happy inside the platform's feature set, and the tier you can afford includes the things you need today and in a year. Check that last part against their current pricing page rather than assuming.

Choose self-hosted if you want plugins, a specific theme, e-commerce without platform commission, full data ownership, or simply the cheaper total cost — and you can accept a few minutes of monthly upkeep as the price of that.

If you are genuinely unsure, self-hosted is the lower-regret default, because it can become anything later. The most common migration direction runs from WordPress.com to self-hosted — people hitting the plugin wall — far more often than the reverse.

Trying self-hosted costs nothing here: 30 days of free blog hosting on your own domain, WordPress installed through Softaculous in one click, no card taken. If it is not for you, export and walk away; the software was free all along.