Registering additional domains through WordPress.com starts at $18.00 per domain, per year (see below for a detailed price list).
Adding a domain you already own costs $13.00 per domain, per year.
I am paying $13 per domain, per year. That’s just for mapping the name to the wordpress blog. I also pay Google for the domain registration. That’s the fee that goes to ICANN. If you want to do that part through Wordpress, you can, but then you pay 18.00 per domain, per year.
It’s confusing because WordPress is trying to upsell their paid packages plans. I don’t do that. I am on the free plan (and I just buy different customizations ala cart). If I have a question about how it all works or what to do next, I ask here and stusser tells me what to do. :)
You should try it just to see if it meets your needs. Get a free blog. Pick a free theme. Go into the admin page and click “Store”. Poke around in there and you’ll see the domain upgrade option (along with all the others). Run it with the free domain for a bit. If you don’t like it, you can always just abandon the blog.
Yup. I’ve done this too, although I’m not doing it with any of my blogs right now.
It’s sort of a pisser because Wordpress also charges a fee for a subdomain mapping. So if I want my book blog mapped to a subdomain of telhajj.com (like book.telhajj.com), I have to pay for both mappings.
See, now there’s an upside to the “own hosting” route. My single hosting instance (about $4/mo now) from Speedy Sparrow is mapped to 4 domains (one of which I’ll be dropping eventually, but the other two of which are professional domains for my gf and I and my currently defunct cooking blog). One hosting package, four sites! Handy :-D
The moment I click the button to pay, it became $99 instead of $13! I think I had better contact their support unless there is a store that I can browse. I’ll check it out later when I’m back at my desk.
I think you’re on some “new” Dashboard back-end (which my own free WP.com test blog was apparently transitioned to at some point). Tim’s on the old Dashboard that’s running on the various WP sites I manage for personal and work stuff.
yeah, looks like I am shit out of luck and probably have to pay them for the $6/month personal plan if I want to have custom domain, ugh! Blogger has no such restriction, but Blogger is ugly and is really just a blog, where as I am trying to move beyond just a blog.
Despite being on that same dashboard, I seem to be able to add the appropriate “map a domain” or “buy a domain from us” functions to my cart for the listed prices–$13/year and $18/year, respectively. I can do so from the Plan menu in that Dashboard, then by going to the Domain tab.
It showed $13/year for me and once I click Buy or Add, it goes to the Cart and the cart will show $99/year, as per my mobile screenshot a couple of screen up. Can you go to the Cart and take a look? It will ask for your credit card so you don’t have to worry about accidentally purchasing it.
You’re in the account level. Go a little lower to get to your blog level.
EDIT: click the image below to see the navigation (discourse is showing a thumbnail that doesn’t reveal the whole thing. :)
EDIT 2: You may have to create a free blog to get a the admin for the blog. Have you created a blog? The admin options for blogs are a little different than the site wide admin for working with your account.
Ok, thanks to Armando’s idea that the reason I was not able to purchase the custom domain at $13/year is due to region restriction, I asked a fellow friend at the State side to purchase it for me from his cosy home in LA. Yeah, I gave him my newly created WP account for him to logon and purchase. So, problem solved. And I followed the advice here in and went with the free account - it will save me lots of headaches vs hosting myself and if ever my website needed customisation, then, I will just pay wordpress.com for their $8/month. Since my initial concern re: custom domain is finally solved, so I am pretty happy to proceed now.
@TimElhajj my free wp does not have WP Admin (see screenshot, which you need to click)
Thanks Maz Andy I’m pretty happy with Wordpress.com. I ended up purchasing the ability to have my own domain. A month later, I saw that Personal Plan (i.e. No ads) is just $2.99/month and so I went with that. I’m pretty happy with it!
It’s a real pain in the ass to upgrade vBulletin, but upgrading Wordpress is stupid easy. You can do it all from the admin UI, and you can set it to upgrade automatically. It will automatically upgrade plugins when the vulnerability is considered critical too. You can configure it to automatically upgrade plugins in all circumstances, but they sometimes have incompatibilities.
Not that I disagree with the thesis; self-hosting is generally a pain in the ass overall. But it is a lot cheaper.
