Buyer's Guide
WordPress.com vs Self-Hosted WordPress: a straight buyer's guide
A straight answer for people new to WordPress and thoroughly baffled by the fact that there are two of them: how to weigh the options, what to leave on the shelf, and the setup we would order.
Straight answer first
If you read one paragraph only, the right pick is self-hosted WordPress on managed hosting — identical software with every door already unlocked, at roughly what .com charges for its locked tiers.
Everything below unpacks that recommendation: the tests to apply, the classic mistake, and how to check any of it for yourself before spending a penny.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
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This guide is written for people new to WordPress and thoroughly baffled by the fact that there are two of them. If that describes you, the decision has a right answer — it just is not the one the comparison-table trade is paid to hand out.
Both routes run exactly the same open-source WordPress; what separates the two products is who holds the keys to the installation and what that installation is permitted to run. Keep that in view and most of the noise in this market sorts itself into signal.
The tests that actually decide it
Hold every candidate against these, in this order:
Freedom to install plugins and themes, which is the wall standing between the two models.
The true cost at the tier where .com unlocks what self-hosting includes as standard.
Who owns the site as an asset, and whether it can be picked up and carried elsewhere.
Freedom to make money from it, since the platform's terms bind .com sites.
The mistake this market is built upon
Paying your way up the .com tiers, one locked feature at a time, for permissions that a self-hosted install grants free on the day it is created.
Once you know to look for it, you can see it right across this market — and dodging it matters more than optimising any other number on the page.
What we would order in your position
Self-hosted WordPress on managed hosting — identical software with every door already unlocked, at roughly what .com charges for its locked tiers.
In concrete terms, that is our Launch WordPress option: one flat price, stocked with the essentials (SSL, migration, backups, mail) this market loves to sell separately, and upgradeable in place when the job grows.
Order an annual plan and the first year of your domain registration is on the house.
The homework worth doing first
Run the same checks on us as on anybody else: message support before you pay and see who answers, hold the renewal price against the order price, read the refund terms end to end, and look the company up — ours is Bohzo Ltd, registered in England and Wales, and the record is public.
Then let the work decide. A fortnight of real use inside the money-back window tells you more than every review site put together, and switching costs nothing but the minute it takes to open a migration ticket.
Why we can afford to give a straight answer
We are a host recommending hosting, and we say it plainly. No pretend neutrality, no league table paid for by referral fees. The trade is openness for trust, and it reads better besides.
What you pay on day one is what you pay at renewal, so the year-two invoice holds no surprises worth opening early.
- Tests you can run for yourself
- Renewal prices on the tag, not in a footnote
- The free move in makes trying us painless
- A refund policy with no small print
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
A refund without a gauntlet
If it does not suit, leaving is a request rather than a negotiation — which is why we are content to be tested.
One price, plainly printed
The order price is the renewal price — the comparison that matters is the one we win without trying.
Support you can try first
Ask us something hard before you pay — how a host behaves pre-sale is the ceiling of what follows.
A real ladder to climb
Shared, VPS and dedicated all under one roof — today's choice never boxes you in tomorrow.
NVMe and LiteSpeed as standard
The performance kit other hosts reserve for premium tiers is simply how our plans are built.
Matched to this verdict
The Launch WordPress plan is this page's recommendation made concrete — one flat price, essentials included, upgradeable in place.
Price Tags Compared
Our figures beside the big names
Sign-up and renewal prices for GoDaddy, Hostinger and Namecheap, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | GoDaddy | Hostinger | Namecheap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.09/mo | $5.99 | $2.99 | $1.88 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.09/mo | $11.99 | $10.99 | $4.29 |
| Entry plan renews at the same price | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| NVMe storage on the entry plan | ||||
| Daily backups on the entry plan | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*Our figure is the cheapest plan we sell, on an annual term. The competitor figures are the lowest shared-hosting price each of them published in July 2026 — those introductory rates normally require signing up for 1–4 years and rise once that term ends. Check their own sites for what they charge today.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Write the requirement in one sentence
Put down what the site has to do and for whom — for people new to WordPress and thoroughly baffled by the fact that there are two of them, that one sentence usually settles half the plan choice by itself.
- 2
Price the second year, not the first
Teaser rates are this market's favourite trick, so compare hosts on what year two costs and the field reorders itself on the spot.
- 3
Try it inside the refund window
A live trial with your own site answers what no review can, and the free migration plus the refund policy make that trial genuinely risk-free.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
What can't a WordPress.com site do?
On the lower tiers: install whatever plugins and themes you like, run custom code, or monetise freely. The Business tier unlocks most of it — at a price above managed self-hosting, which offers the same freedoms from the first day.
Is self-hosted WordPress harder work to run?
Hardly at all on managed WordPress hosting. Installation is one click, updates and backups are handled for you, and support covers the platform. The 'hard mode' reputation belongs to unmanaged servers, not to this.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
Do you shift an existing site across at no charge?
We do. Open a ticket with the login details for your current host and the whole lot comes over: files, databases, mailboxes and configuration. You check the copy before DNS changes hands, and the old site keeps serving customers until the new one takes the traffic, so nobody ever sees a gap.
Can one plan hold more than a single website?
From the Pro tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own domain, mailboxes and certificate, all under one account. If those extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, reseller hosting is the better fit: it gives each one proper separation.
How quickly can I be up and running?
Minutes, not days. The account opens the moment the order clears, the domain — free for year one on annual plans — attaches straight away, and the one-click installer puts WordPress or any of 400+ applications on the page before you leave your chair. Already have a site elsewhere? Hand it over and we move it free, usually inside a day.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. We do not run teaser rates, so there is no year-two ambush waiting in the calendar, and your bookkeeping can treat the hosting line as a fixed number.
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