Difference Between WordPress and WordPress.com
If you were concerned about yesterday’s news that Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, is selling your data to artificial intelligence modeling companies , you probably shouldn’t worry about it. As dubious as it may sound that a company is profiting from its users’ content, the vast majority of what we now put on the Internet is already being consumed by hungry AI bots as language training.
However, this news has caused general confusion that arises whenever the discussion touches on WordPress, and it is important if you are concerned about whether this data broker will affect you: What is the difference between WordPress, a content management system, and WordPress . com, web hosting, and is your personal WordPress site included in the data being sold?
What is WordPress?
As noted, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) used by approximately 40% of all websites. The simplest way to describe a CMS is as a database that stores all of a site’s content, connected to standard web code (be it HTML, PHP, Javascript, Ruby, or Django) that tells the data what it should look like and how it should function. upon access. Let’s put this into practice: the content of, say, a blog post—words, images, links, and titles—is stored in a database. Web code (often referred to as a “theme”) tells the site what color the background should be, whether to align text and images left or right, what font to use, and where to place images and text. how big to make them and what the overall plan should look like.
The reason people use a CMS like WordPress is simple: writing web pages by hand sucks and the results can be completely inconsistent. Using a CMS means you can make universal changes to the theme, and also ensures that the data itself is portable, meaning it can be easily exported and used elsewhere. You can always change your theme, which means change the layout, colors, fonts and everything else, but the data in the database will remain the same.
WordPress launched about 20 years ago and has become popular among competitors such as Moveable Type and Drupal for a number of reasons. Although for a time it was considered simply a blogging tool, WordPress and other CMSs have quickly proven to be useful tools for creating fully functional websites for businesses. Blogs make up a small portion of CMS content these days.
WordPress has also become popular for the simplest of reasons: it’s (technically) free.
WordPress itself—that is, the files that make up the basic structure of the CMS—is available for free under an open source license called the GPL . In short, you don’t have to pay for any WordPress code or any derivative products. You can simply download it from WordPress.org and install it on any web host or locally on your computer. This is what people often call “self-hosted WordPress” and these days almost every web host has a utility that they can use to install WordPress for you.
While you can’t charge for WordPress itself, a huge industry has grown up around custom WordPress themes and plugins, and the development of all sorts of software features.
What is WordPress.com?
WordPress is currently maintained by a dedicated community of volunteer developers and is trademarked by the WordPress Foundation , a 501c3 non-profit organization. The WordPress.org website is an affiliate of the WordPress Foundation.
Meanwhile, the people who invented WordPress started their own company, the aforementioned Automattic , and their first product was selling hosted WordPress sites. In other words, you can host your WordPress site anywhere yourself, or get it directly from the source at WordPress.com .
If you’re confused, don’t worry; this has been confusing everyone for two decades and is a frequent topic of discussion. To put it simply, think of it this way: if you go to WordPress.com to log into your site, your site’s content runs the risk of being used to train AI models. If your site is hosted somewhere other than WordPress.com (such as GoDaddy, Bluehost, or Siteground), then you have your own WordPress site.
Differences Between Self-Hosted and .com-Hosted WordPress
Even though these two WordPress options are based on the same core technology, the difference between them isn’t just who you pay to host your site. WordPress.com is a much more tightly controlled process with a limited number of plugins, themes, and options. Most importantly, it offers customer support. You can also pay for various utility upgrades, such as your own domain name or backup services.
Self-hosted WordPress has no restrictions, which is both a blessing and a curse. You can install any plugin or write your own. You can use any theme or write one yourself. In theory, it’s yours, from the data to the domain name to the host. But if you somehow break it, you’ll have to figure out how to code your way out of it.
Is your WordPress data really at risk?
As far as we know, AI issues primarily affect WordPress.com sites—those hosted on WordPress.com. You can opt out of having your data included in the program by changing your settings on your WordPress.com site. If you are self-hosted, it appears that your data is not sold to Automattic’s AI partners. However, this does not mean that it is not used to train AI models simply because it is on the Internet. AI bots troll content the same way search engine spiders troll content. And as Lifehacker senior tech editor Jake Peterson pointed out yesterday , many self-hosted WordPress sites use a plugin calledJetpack . Jetpack is a set of services that Automattic can provide for self-hosted WordPress, including CDN, backup, spam monitoring, and more. Since Jetpacks is a cloud service that connects your database to Automattic, it can potentially be used in the same way that Automattic uses WordPress.com sites.
Yesterday, Automattic X reported (officially known as a tweet) that WordPress.org was not included in the AI modeling content, but it did not address the specific issue of using Jetpack as a gateway for that content.