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Does WordPress provide hosting?
Yes, WordPress does provide hosting and much more on WordPress.com. WordPress.com provides both free and Managed WordPress Hosting plans. WordPress.com will also manage all aspects of not only hosting your WordPress site, but also your WordPress installations, updates, themes, plugins, speed and security tasks as well.
However, WordPress.org does not provide hosting only the free WordPress CMS as well as thousands of free WordPress themes and plugins. You can also self host your WordPress site and choose from scores of web hosting providers.
So if you’re reading this, then you are either already using WordPress for your website or are interested and learning more about WordPress so you can set up a website. Either way, you’re on the right track.
Did you know that WordPress powers about 40% of all websites currently on the web?
Yes, almost 40% of all websites use WordPress. But did you know that WordPress also offers hosting?
That’s right. WordPress is not only the most popular CMS on the internet, but it also offers a variety of hosting packages to host your website on.
In addition, you’d be surprised at how affordable WordPress hosting on WordPress.com is. Especially when compared to other hosting plans.
Let’s go into more about WordPress hosting on WordPress.com as well as some frequently asked questions regarding WordPress and WordPress hosting in general.
Does WordPress provide free hosting?
Actually, yes. As we mentioned above, WordPress.com hosting does offer a free plan to get you started.
However, you will be quite limited in what you can do with your website just staying with WordPress’s free hosting plan.
For example, WordPress will put ads on your website whether you like it or not. In addition, you will not receive any of the revenue from those ads, WordPress.com does.
That’s the price of their free hosting.
However, if you look at their paid hosting plans, they’re very reasonable. In fact, some of them are actually cheaper than many of the Shared hosting plans offered by the most popular hosting companies on the internet.
Does WordPress include hosting?
First off, you have to know the difference between WordPress, the content management system or (CMS), which your website’s theme is built upon, and WordPress.com which is owned by Automattic, the founders of the whole WordPress ecosystem, which by the way, is open source.
As far as WordPress themes go, you can literally get a WordPress theme for free. There are many free WordPress themes you can choose from when you sign up for most hosting plans, including at WordPress.com.
WordPress.com the hosting, however, is not free, as you can see below.
How much does it cost to host on WordPress?
As you could see from the price list below, to host your WordPress website on WordPress.com is quite reasonable.
Who better and more qualified to host your WordPress website than WordPress themselves on WordPress.com.
What is the difference between hosting and WordPress hosting?
Hosting, as you may already know, is when you pay a company, a hosting company, for the use of their servers to host your domain on.
Now many hosting companies not only offer hosting for WordPress sites, but also sites built with other content management systems like Joomla, Drupal etc.
However, many hosting companies offer specialized “WordPress hosting”.
WordPress hosting is when a company offers to not only host your website on one of its servers, but also offers dedicated servers in their server centers to only WordPress built sites.
There are few advantages to this. First, all the maintenance, customer service, etc. is handled by specialists who know a lot about WordPress along with hosting them on their servers.
In addition, WordPress updates and any other relevant issues, rollouts, releases and basically all things WordPress will get rolled out first and fastest to those with WordPress hosting.
Now you don’t need special WordPress hosting or a special WordPress hosting package to host your website from any legitimate hosting company.
You could simply get a normal hosting plan like a Shared plan, VPS, even Cloud Hosting without getting this specialized, “WordPress hosting” on designated servers hosting only sites built on WordPress.
Is WordPress free to publish?
If you have a free WordPress blog on their free hosting plan you’re free to publish.
Even if you have a paid WordPress com hosting plan, you are also free to publish. In fact, you have much more control and freedom on how you publish when you have a paid hosting package from WordPress.com than on their free hosting plan.
As I had mentioned above, with the free WordPress hosting plan you give up space on your website for WordPress.com to put its own advertising on your website, into the content you have built yourself.
In addition to this, you will not be able to use third-party services like Google Analytics while your website sits on WordPress.com’s free plan.
Although if you are interested in the statistics, like how many visits your content is getting as well as some other statistical data, WordPress.com does offer their free users access to this information, data and stats.
Should I use WordPress org or WordPress?
WordPress.org is basically the site that contains all of WordPress’s plugins.
Plugins and the use of plugins is basically what separates WordPress from other CMSs. Now plugins aren’t perfect.
However, the use of plugins do allow coders and non-coders alike to install various forms of functionality and customization to their WordPress websites without either knowing how to code or using code.
You see, plugins are basically pieces of code that have been put together to perform certain functions. How many functions can these plugins perform?
Well, WordPress has literally over 55,000 plugins on WordPress.org and offer thousands more functions on these plugins.
There are new plugins being added to WordPress.org as well as deleted almost every single day.
In fact, updates to these plugins are continuous. Of course, any plugin that is offered on WordPress.org is free to use.
However, you should also know that all plugins either have a pro or premium version, which are paid versions and/or third-party tracking cookies built into them.
Most of these cookies are harmless and only are used for the functionality of the plugin itself so it operates properly within your WordPress website, but others are used to gather your visitors information. You should also be aware of this.
Can I pay WordPress monthly?
For WordPress.com hosting, yes, you can pay monthly as you can see from the pricing plans. As far as using WordPress themes go, pricing varies.
Usually, you can either get a free WordPress theme or if you go for premium versions of the free themes that you like or decide to just opt in for a paid version, most either have a lifetime license or a one-time payment, you simply buy the license then pay the yearly update fees.
With these plans you get various premium features that you would not get on free WordPress themes as well as support from the developer or and/or agency.
Furthermore, with the yearly renewal fees, these include updates to the theme as well. In my opinion when you find a good theme that you’re comfortable working with, that’s simple and fast and has excellent support, then their paid versions are usually well worth the money.
Many themes actually allow you to use them on unlimited sites, whereas others have a limit of 1 or 2 sites or up to a few hundred.
I use GeneratePress on all my sites and they not only offer a great premium package and excellent support, but the developer is quite active in the support of GeneratePress himself and his name is Tom Usborn. In my opinion, the yearly renewal fees that I pay to GeneratePress are well worth it.
How much does a basic WordPress site cost?
A basic WordPress site with a decent theme that’s fairly easy to use and has plenty of functionality can normally run you up to about $100.
That’s not including the yearly updates which you may need to pay extra for. But price’s vary for themes. Though you can get yourself a good premium theme along with excellent support for under $100.
In my opinion, the best themes out there are GeneratePress, Astra and a third would be Ocean WP.
How does WordPress make money?
WordPress, the CMS, is open source. This means that there are many contributors that add to the CMS, plugins and improve it on a regular basis.
However, the company Automattic, which actually owns the WordPress name as well as WordPress.com which sells a variety of WordPress related products including hosting, also makes money by having several other companies under the Automattic umbrella.
These include in addition to WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, CrowdSignal and many more.
The benefits of WordPress hosting?
WordPress, as you can see, is it’s own ecosystem. Not only does WordPress provide hosting, but WordPress provides a whole slew of other services that are designed to totally optimize your WordPress website as well as your presence on the web.
The beauty of WordPress is that it is open source. Meaning, their CMS is free for anyone to use and build upon.
You’re free to choose simply to get a WordPress theme and arrange for your own hosting and other packages to optimize your WordPress website on your own.
You can also go all in and anchor your WordPress website to the whole WordPress ecosystem itself, by getting a WordPress theme, getting a WordPress.com hosting package, installing Jetpack as well as their other services onto your WordPress website. It all depends on you and your needs.
The beauty of WordPress is that it allows coders and non-coders alike to participate in having a presence on the web without any need to write code.
As far as WordPress.com hosting packages go, I would say they are either on par with other hosting packages on the internet today that are offered for WordPress websites or better.
In fact, since they are WordPress.com, the founders of WordPress, you may get a little extra advice and knowledge from dealing with WordPress.com support that other hosting companies may not have the same knowledge or even provide.
Let’s not forget that if you use WordPress.com hosting you will be on the front line of any updates and improvements in the ecosystem that can help your website on the web.
In any case, if you don’t like the hosting that WordPress.com provides, you do have the freedom to switch hosting services.
After all, the true benefit of using WordPress is the freedom and flexibility to control your own place on the internet, unlike many other CMS’s.
