WordPress.com adds paid upgrades
WordPress.com, the popular site for hosting your blog if you want to run WordPress but don’t feel like installing it yourself, has recently announced paid upgrade options in the form of custom CSS, in which you can edit the themes provided to you by the site or even create your own new ones.
They’re also currently testing domain mapping, which is a feature that I think many people would like to see. It’s also important from a competitive point of view, as you can use Blogger on your own domain and TypePad also offers this feature. I’m actually surprised that this wasn’t the first feature to be implemented as I would have thought it was the most requested feature, but I suppose it might require more behind the scenes work than things such as custom CSS.
As well as the two upgrade options already mentioned, there’s also a post for discussing paid upgrade ideas, so if there’s something else that you’d like to see and are willing to pay for then it might be a good idea to add a comment there and see if it makes it onto WordPress.com at some point.
The only problem I see with all these paid upgrade options is that they could add up to rather a lot of cash if you wanted several of them. It could end up being the case that if you need more than one or two of the features then it will be cheaper to buy a budget hosting account instead and install WordPress on that. Having said that, WordPress.com does offer you the advantage of not having to upgrade your software whenever a new version is released, which I suspect is a major selling point for many non-technical people who want to have a blog without worrying about the underlying software.