There are some of us who think that WordPress is the bomb. Consequently, we recommend it to a lot of people.
There are two types of WordPress blogs.
Hosted – Meaning you pay a monthly fee to a web hosting company to host your WordPress driven site. This can be from 3 dollars a month on up depending on where you go, and how much service you want if something breaks. I use GoDaddy.com, but if something breaks that I can’t fix, I can call for help. I have been using them for just about forever.
Shared – Meaning that you went or are going to WordPress.com and signed up for an account. If you did this, you would have a blog address of something like *yourname.wordpress.com or soemthing similar. From what this author is seeing on the WordPress.com site, this is free. You can pay a fee for a custom domain name, but as long as the blog is hosted at WordPress.com you won’t be able to install plugins. Here is a link to the info that WordPress.com has to say about plugin usage: http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/
This isn’t to say that the shared hosting environment offered by WordPress.com is bad, on the contrary, it is beneficial to those who lack the knowledge or time necessary to manage their own hosted site. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, I wasn’t born with knowledge. Much as I hate to admit it, it has taken me years to accumulate the random and sometimes useless facts that are bouncing around in my head.
To recap:
1. Hosted – costs money but also supports custom plugins.
2. Shared – free, but doesn’t support custom plugins.
If you have questions, please ask, I certainly don’t mind, and if I give the wrong information inadvertently, I don’t mind being corrected. Thanks for reading and cheers!