Okay – so I have finally decided to bite the bullet and set up my own site Kateyboo.com rather than have this hosted on Wordpress.com’s platform.
I initially took the easy route and established a blog account at Wordpress.com, being www.kateyboo.wordpress.com but after researching the difference between Wordpress.org versus Wordpress.com, I decided to get this site hosted rather than have it on Wordpress.com’s platform.
Why? For a variety of reasons:
1. I can customise the appearance of Kateyboo.com without being restricted with themes and plugins. At some stage, the plan is to have the website redesigned to refresh its appearance. Using Wordpress.com, I would be restricted from doing this.
2. Even though I can pay $15 per year to have my blog as www.kateyboo.com rather than www.kateyboo.wordpress.com, I am paying about $4 per month at www.justhost.com for unlimited domain hosting and unlimited space so I already had a host that I could use that wasn’t costing me any extra.
3. Most importantly, at Wordpress.com you are unable to display any advertisements. Rather, Wordpress.com could display adsense on your site instead!
However, there are plenty of benefits of using Wordpress.com for bloggers, especially beginner bloggers. They are:
1. It’s free and Wordpress.com will host your blog for you!
2. Simple to use and easy to set up – you can still customise your blog with a variety of themes and plugins.
3. They provide spam protection, automatic pinging, spell checker, tags and automatic backup.
As a beginner blogger, it is probably worthwhile setting up an account at Wordpress.com and then if you are serious about blogging for the long-term, you can move it at a later stage.
I personally, didn’t want the hassel of doing this down the track so have decided to register my domain and have it hosted at www.justhost.com.
I’m not the most technologically literate person, but so far so good!
