Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1
One premium service many of us might consider is going ad
free, which costs about $30 per year. It's said that most
WordPress.com site visitors never see an ad, but some blog-
gers don't want any ads to appear on their blogs, ever.
Other bloggers find any ad, or specific ads, so inappropriate
that paying to prevent them makes sense. For example, a
nonprofit or government organization won't want to show
ads, or a company might be concerned that competitors' ads
could appear on its site.
The most visible service for many of us is the charge for getting your own domain name, which cur-
rently costs about $15 per year. This is double or more the price you would pay for registering a
domain on your own without hosting, but it includes Automattic's costs for supporting the external
domain, some of the hosting services that non-domain-owning WordPress bloggers get for free, and
probably some profit.
You can also pay for additional storage for text and graphics beyond the 3GB allowance you get for
free. You have to pay for at least one such chunk of additional storage to have WordPress host even
the most minor chunk of audio; the current charge is $20 per year for the first such chunk.
You have to pay a separate charge of about $5 per month for WordPress video streaming support,
though you can work around this with third-party hosts such as YouTube. All of these hosting-
related options are described in Chapter 10, “Adding Upgrades, Audio, and Video.”
WordPress allows you to customize the
style sheets
for your WordPress.com blog; that is, the code
that gives sites their look and feel, in the form of
CSS
, or Cascading Style Sheets, which are
described in Chapter 12, “The WordPress Toolkit: Themes.” The cost of customizing your style
sheet is currently about $15 per year.
If you maintain a private blog, you're limited to 35 users for free, which is usually plenty for testing
and small groups. If you want to go large and serve a wider audience with a private blog, you can
add an unlimited number of private users for about $30 per year.
There's a paid version of Automattic's tool, PollDaddy. Created and improved to make hosting polls
easy (and free), the paid version removes the PollDaddy branding and allows unlimited questions
per survey.
Automattic developed Akismet, a spam solution for WordPress blogs. Akismet is said to do an
excellent job of stopping comment and trackback spam, which we explain in more detail later in the
topic. If you maintain a corporate blog or run a network of blogs, you have to buy a license for
Akismet, which costs $50 per month or more. There's a bit of a Robin Hood aspect to this, with only
the better-off users having to pay for a service that protects all WordPress bloggers from spam.
Automattic also charges for access to their Support Network for WordPress. If you pay for this sup-
port, the WordPress development team gets involved in fixing any problems you may have. Charges
for this service start at about $2,500 per year. Again, there's a Robin Hood aspect here, as the prob-
lems that are resolved for the minority who pay are also resolved for the majority who don't.
WordPress.org hosts a list of third-party web hosting providers who pay a fee to be listed. These
are referral links, so Automattic gets a commission from sales.
note
Unfortunately, paying
WordPress.com to go ad-free does
not allow you to put in your own
ads. To do that you need to host
a blog with the WordPress.org
software.
