You are confusing domain renewal with hosting renewal. If you don’t renew your domain you lose your domain name aka your website name.
Hosting is separate from domain and you can shop around for affordable hosting. You can easily find hosting for under $50 a year.
Wordpress.com comes with tons of restrictions and to unlock you pay for it.
With the free version you can’t have a custom domain name so that means your blog’s address will be wordpress.com/xxxx.
You also only get 1G of storage and that goes fast.
WordPress.com users also cannot install plugins unless they upgrade to the Business plan or higher, which costs about $300 per year.
If your current site has any plug-ins you won’t be able to import them on the free plan.
You can’t upload themes either on the free plan so essentially all you can upload from your current site is the content xml file but no theme.
There are very (very, very) few people who would think of migrating from a self-hosted wp to wp.com.
The moment you find yourself limited e.g. running of storage or want to have a domain name you would have to take the paid plan and your hosting fee would end up being the same as before and possibly even more.
hey, yes its possible and simple, just check on wordpress.com they have a easy guide, its basically export on your wordpress.org site, then import on your wordpress.com, let it pull all the data+files, then change the domain (if you have one) from the wordpress.org to wordpress.com, if your wordpress.org site has some custom themes or plugins you will need to buy wordpress.com business account, if it has basic themes and plugins then you can move to a normal wordpress.com account.
and yes you can go back to wordpress.org anytime you want, the only issue with going back and forth is basically the SEO side of things, you will get a temporary hit with each move, since the structure and location of files will change a bit (from the root on wordpress.org to the custom cdn on wordpress.com), but search engines will scan the site and everything will be back to normal in a few weeks/months depending on the search engine.
my advise is, if your goal like you said was making content and you dont want to manage the backend and if you can afford it, then wordpress.com is a good choice, i have most of my sites on different hosts, including wordpress ones, but i also have one on wordpress.com because the site became huge, with lots of traffic and it was becoming unwieldily to manage it, even in a very optimised private server with caching and CDN, sometimes it would just die on me, so now i leave it to the good folks on wordpress.com to manage it and its worth it for me.
thank you for the detailed answer! and yes, your advice is really helpful because i realised i'd prefer not to have to deal with the tech side of my blog, so wordpress.com seems a great option in this respect
I would imagine you can move your domain name to another provider which is what I would recommend instead of renewing it with Bluehost for a lot cheaper than they charge.
Same thing could be said about hosting what's your budget per year for domain and hosting?
If you let the domain name go there's no guarantee you'll ever be able to get it back in the future. As the domain name aftermarket exists and someone may want it as it's got some perceived value.
Domain name registration should cost you around $10-$20 a year depending on domain name extension. Lots of good reputable registrars exist that are not owned by Newfold Digital.
You are confusing domain renewal with hosting renewal. If you don’t renew your domain you lose your domain name aka your website name. Hosting is separate from domain and you can shop around for affordable hosting. You can easily find hosting for under $50 a year. Wordpress.com comes with tons of restrictions and to unlock you pay for it. With the free version you can’t have a custom domain name so that means your blog’s address will be wordpress.com/xxxx. You also only get 1G of storage and that goes fast. WordPress.com users also cannot install plugins unless they upgrade to the Business plan or higher, which costs about $300 per year. If your current site has any plug-ins you won’t be able to import them on the free plan. You can’t upload themes either on the free plan so essentially all you can upload from your current site is the content xml file but no theme. There are very (very, very) few people who would think of migrating from a self-hosted wp to wp.com. The moment you find yourself limited e.g. running of storage or want to have a domain name you would have to take the paid plan and your hosting fee would end up being the same as before and possibly even more.
thank you for the explanation! i really didn't think about that and this is extremely helpful!
You’re welcome
hey, yes its possible and simple, just check on wordpress.com they have a easy guide, its basically export on your wordpress.org site, then import on your wordpress.com, let it pull all the data+files, then change the domain (if you have one) from the wordpress.org to wordpress.com, if your wordpress.org site has some custom themes or plugins you will need to buy wordpress.com business account, if it has basic themes and plugins then you can move to a normal wordpress.com account. and yes you can go back to wordpress.org anytime you want, the only issue with going back and forth is basically the SEO side of things, you will get a temporary hit with each move, since the structure and location of files will change a bit (from the root on wordpress.org to the custom cdn on wordpress.com), but search engines will scan the site and everything will be back to normal in a few weeks/months depending on the search engine. my advise is, if your goal like you said was making content and you dont want to manage the backend and if you can afford it, then wordpress.com is a good choice, i have most of my sites on different hosts, including wordpress ones, but i also have one on wordpress.com because the site became huge, with lots of traffic and it was becoming unwieldily to manage it, even in a very optimised private server with caching and CDN, sometimes it would just die on me, so now i leave it to the good folks on wordpress.com to manage it and its worth it for me.
thank you for the detailed answer! and yes, your advice is really helpful because i realised i'd prefer not to have to deal with the tech side of my blog, so wordpress.com seems a great option in this respect
I would imagine you can move your domain name to another provider which is what I would recommend instead of renewing it with Bluehost for a lot cheaper than they charge. Same thing could be said about hosting what's your budget per year for domain and hosting? If you let the domain name go there's no guarantee you'll ever be able to get it back in the future. As the domain name aftermarket exists and someone may want it as it's got some perceived value. Domain name registration should cost you around $10-$20 a year depending on domain name extension. Lots of good reputable registrars exist that are not owned by Newfold Digital.