My partners and I are planning on adding Church Website Development and hosting to our list of services in the next year or so so I have been doing a lot of research on the topic. Our solution is going to be built on the wordpress framework so when I found this post on Church Blogger about the differences between the two wordpress services and the advantages I figured I should post it here for reference: (I should probably state for the record that it is my opinion that Church Websites should be hosted on their own domain and developed by an organization like Pleth Networks, LLC unless the church has an IT staff or group of volunteers that are extremely web saavy, and/or comfortable with WordPress’s hosted solution.)
This post clarifies this issue for any who do not know the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
WordPress is a PHP/MySql based content management system that you can download and install on your server. It is hosted at wordpress.org. At this site, there is a support forum to help you solve problems that you are having.
But at wordpress.com you can obtain a free blog which is powered by wordpress but which is not customisable to any level. You can choose from a variety of themes, but even after paying a fee you can only change the CSS.
WordPress.com is good cheap option to get you started, but churches should have their websites hosted elsewhere where they can customise it. But most importantly, so they can get a custom domain… www.mychurch.org.uk, rather that mychurch.wordpress.com
The church website that has been set up uses the wordpress code on its own site wordpress software, rather than being hosted on wordpress.com.
Update: wordpress.com now allows sites hosted to pay and use their own domain so one of the points above is not so relevant. However, they can only register .com domain names and no others, which is a bit of a problem for UK based charitable organisations.
Source: WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com « Church website and blog ideas
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